BERKELEY, Calif. (KRON) — Inauguration 2021 is historic for the country, but especially grand for the Bay Area.
The first woman to ever serve in the White House as vice president grew up in Berkeley, in a home on Bancroft Way.
Kamala Harris is also the first person of Black and south asian descent to be elected to the position.
Harris was born in Oakland to a Jamaican American father and Indian American mother, who was a cancer researcher.
There is a sense of pride across the Bay Area and especially in the East Bay, where a mural of Harris lives at her former school, Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley.
The 56-year-old has had a string of successes on the local and state level in California before she ran for president and eventually became VP.
Harris graduated from UC Hastings law school and became an Alameda County Assistant District Attorney. Then, Assistant DA in San Francisco.
This led her to be elected to two terms as DA in the city in 2003. After that, she set her sights on a state position as California Attorney General, which she got in 2011.
Her federal service began as a U.S. Senator for California in 2017.
And now in 2021, she heads to D.C. with her husband, Doug Emhoff, so she can serve alongside President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, outside Harris’s childhood home in Berkeley, people arrive to celebrate.
