TOI Correspondent from Washington: Harvard has produced eight US Presidents, Yale has given five, and Princeton has produced three. Few expected Howard University, a largely black university in Washington DC — often phonetically mistaken for Harvard and sometimes called Black Harvard much to alumni disapproval — to make the cut anytime soon. Most of America’s 46 Presidents have come from elite white-dominated institutions.
Yet the modest but storied Howard University, her alma mater, is where Kamala Harris will spend Tuesday night hosting an “Election Watch” party. The most chronicled among 101 so-called HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in the US whose origin goes back to the Civil War, this was Harris’ stomping ground in the 1980s as an undergraduate.
Where Presidential candidates spend election night, typically hosting a watch party, says much about comfort zone. Donald Trump is expected to be at his gilded estate in Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night. In the past, Biden hared back to Delaware in the 2020 election, hosting an election night party at the Chase Center in Wilmington. Hillary Clinton‘s traumatic night in 2016 was at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney returned to home turf in Chicago and Boston respectively in 2012.
Kamala Harris could have chosen San Francisco or Los Angeles, where she has homes, or simply the vice-presidential residence at 1, Observatory Circle in Washington DC. Instead, after not having leaned into blackness (or Indian heritage) throughout the election cycle, she has finally homed in her black alma mater that has long cocked a snook at the white establishment in the nation’s capital.
Howard’s celebrated alumni include the distinguished jurist and US Supreme Court Thurgood Marshall, the writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the singer Roberta Flack, and Guyana’s late president Cheddi Jagan among others. But the inspiration for the university’s now most famous alumna to come there was someone not listed among its elites.
In 1959, when Kamala Harris’ mother Shyamala was winging her way to Berkeley, a young Sikh political activist named Ajit Singh, a student of Dr Manmohan Singh, would head out to Howard University to obtain an MA in economics. He would later move for his Ph.D to UC Berkeley, where his confreres included Kamala’s father Donald Harris, the Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen and Baron Meghad Desai, the British-Indian economist. This was the distinguished crew that Kamala Harris would hang out with as a toddler, her parents taking her to anti-war protests in a stroller.
Eventually, it was “Ajit uncle” who guided her to Howard, a black dominated institution which has very few Indian alumni (Indians typically prefer elite white institutions). Arriving here two years into Ronald Reagan‘s first term, she lived in a campus dorm apartment called Eton Tower near Thomas Circle, barely a mile from the White House.
Graduating in pol science and economics, she would get her first taste of politics with summer internship in the office of progressive California Senator Alan Cranston. Years later she would win the same Senate seat Cranston held and return to the same office (Senate Hart Building Room $112) where she once sorted mail as an intern.
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US Presidential Election | Donald Trump | Kamala Harris | JD Vance