What better way to celebrate MLK Day than with a fresh dose of Black Girl Magic?!? Kamala Harris is serving it up in a real way by announcing she will indeed be entering the 2020 presidential race.
Kamala Harris is a first-term senator and former California attorney general known for her rigorous questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominees. Vowing to “bring our voices together,” Harris would be the first woman to hold the presidency and the second African-American if she succeeds.
Harris, who grew up in Oakland, California, and is a daughter of parents from Jamaica and India, made her long-anticipated announcement on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“I am running for president of the United States,” she said. “And I’m very excited about it.”
Harris launched her presidential bid as the nation observes what would have been the 90th birthday of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The timing was a clear signal thatthe California senator— who has joked that she had a “stroller’s-eye view” of the civil rights movement because her parents wheeled her and her sister Maya to protests — sees herself as another leader in that fight.
She plans a formal campaign launch in Oakland on Jan. 27. The campaign will be based in Baltimore, with a second office in Oakland.
Harris joins what is expected to be a wide-open race for the Democratic presidential nomination. There’s no apparent front-runner at this early stage and Harris will face off against several Senate colleagues.
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Her logo pays tribute to Shirley Chisholm, the first black candidate who vied for a major party’s presidential nomination when she sought the Democratic Party’s nod in 1972. She was the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination as well.
Harris’ slogan “For the People” is both a nod to her work as a prosecutor, when Harris would address the court as “Kamala Harris, for the people” as well as a tie toChisholm with the yellow and red colors the former New York congresswoman used in her presidential bid, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Harris launches her campaign fresh off of a tour to promote her latest memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” which was widely seen as a stage-setter for a presidential bid.
She is already planning her first trip to an early primary state as a declared candidate. On Friday, Harris will travel to South Carolina to attend the Pink Ice Gala in Columbia, which is hosted by a South Carolina chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which Harris pledged as an undergraduate student at Howard University. The sorority, founded more than 100 years ago, is a stronghold in the African-American community.
South Carolina, where black voters make up a large share of the Democratic electorate, is likely to figure heavily into Harris’s prospects. And early voting in Harris’s home state of California will overlap with the traditional early nominating contests, which could give Harris a boost.
Harris is likely to face questions about her law enforcement record, particularly after the Black Lives Matter movement and activists across the country pushed for a criminal justice overhaul. Harris’s prosecutorial record has recently come under new scrutiny after a blistering opinion piece in The New York Times criticized her repeated claim that she was a “progressive prosecutor,” focused on changing a broken criminal justice system from within.
Harris addressed her law enforcement background in her book. She argued it was a “false choice” to decide between supporting the police and advocating for greater scrutiny of law enforcement.
She “knew that there was an important role on the inside, sitting at the table where the decisions were being made,” she wrote. “When activists came marching andbanging on the doors, I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”
Harris supported legislation that passed the Senate last year that overhauled the criminal justice system, particularly when it comes to sentencing rules.
We’re excited about today’s announcement and look forward to seeing what Harris bring to the race.
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The Associated Press and Fox News contributed to this report.
