HARRIS HONORS FRIENDS — AND CHERISHED BIBLE
Swearing-in ceremony: ‘Kamala continues to stay grounded in her upbringing’
The Shelton family Bible is so worn that tape holds the binding in place. On a flight this week from Oakland to Washington, D.C., Saniyyah Smith carried it, safe and close, in a burgundy velvet sachet with gold tassels.
This humble, beloved Bible once belonged to family matriarch Regina Shelton — whose name is engraved in gold in the lower right corner. Fifty years ago, she took care of two little sisters, Kamala and Maya, at her home on Bancroft Way in Berkeley when their single mother worked late. With posters of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman on the basement walls, Shelton taught the sisters they could be anything they wanted to be.
On the West Front of the U.S. Capitol today, the older one, Kamala Harris, 56, will place her hand on this cherished book — along with a Bible used by the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — and be sworn in shortly before 9 a.m. Pacific time as the 49th vice president of the United States.
As she makes history as the first woman and first woman of color ever to hold the esteemed office, her friends say, she will embrace her Bay Area roots — and the Shelton family Bible.
“It’s a reminder that Kamala continues to stay grounded in her upbringing and the things instilled in her and the strong women she grew up with,” said Smith, 43, who is the late Regina Shelton’s eldest granddaughter and lives in Oakland. “I’m just so proud of her and so grateful to be able to see how she continues to honor my grandmother’s legacy.”
Smith and her mother, Sharon Shelton McGaffie, and aunt Judy Shelton Robinson are part of a small group of Harris’ inner circle of friends attending the inauguration in person. They met with Harris, who served one term as a California U.S. senator, briefly on Tuesday to share “air hugs.”
“I’m so excited I can barely talk,” said Derreck Johnson, 56, also part of the entourage and a close friend who first met Harris when they were 16 and spent summers driving around Oakland in his yellow 1979 MGB convertible.
When he met up with Harris in a private banquet room Tuesday afternoon, “We told her, ‘We’re here for you, we love you. We understand you belong to the world, but we’re always going to be here for you no matter what.’ ”
Harris’ inauguration, he said, proves to him “that the American dream is real. You can look at it and see it through the life of Kamala D. Harris. Most people who are groomed for this, they’ve lived with a silver spoon in their mouths.”
Not Harris, he said. The daughter of an immigrant Indian mother and a Jamaican father who divorced when she was young, Harris grew up during the civil rights era in Berkeley. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, became a biomedical scientist, and her father, Donald Harris, a professor at Stanford, but times were tough in Harris’ early years when her mother lived in the upstairs unit of a duplex and relied on Regina Shelton to help take care of her girls as she worked late in the lab as a student at UC Berkeley.
In an essay she wrote for Bustle last year, Harris called Shelton “one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and she lived by the belief that you always lend a hand to those in need. The Sheltons devoted themselves to ensuring that neighborhood kids got off to the best possible start in life.”
Harris and her sister attended church on Sundays with Shelton and her family, where Shelton, whom she considered “a second mother,” carried her Bible each week.
The coronavirus pandemic and turmoil two weeks ago on Capitol Hill are keeping many of Harris’ Bay Area friends and supporters home, reluctantly, including those who campaigned for her since her early days as San Francisco’s first female district attorney.
Lateefah Simon, 43, who was a young single mom when Harris hired her in the early 2000s to lead a program helping teens exploited for prostitution, remembers Harris showing her the long line of portraits of past district attorneys — all white men. Harris’ portrait stood out at the end. The same will now be true on the portrait wall of American vice presidents.
Simon would attend the inauguration if not for Biden and Harris’ efforts to keep it small and safe, so instead she and her 9-year-old daughter, Lelah, will dress up in their “inauguration clothes” and watch the ceremony on TV.
“I want my daughter to see up close what this moment is,” Simon said. “I think of all the moms, the single moms who raised their children, made dinner at 9 p.m. every night who wanted the best for their little girls — and for their children to see this moment.”
Also special — Simon’s 24-year-old daughter, Aminah, is a law student at Harris’ undergraduate alma mater, Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C.
The Howard University marching band will perform as part of today’s ceremony.
Harris’ friends — many who receive annual calls from her singing “Happy Birthday” — are heartbroken they can’t attend the inauguration of a woman they have supported in every campaign.
“It’s hard for her extended community in San Francisco, that just because of COVID we can’t be there,” said Debbie Mesloh, who has campaigned for Harris since the early 2000s. “It will not diminish, I can say for myself, the joy I’m going to feel when her hand is going to be on both of those Bibles.”
When Harris was sworn in as San Francisco district attorney in 2004, she placed her hand on the Bill of Rights. But ever since, she had taken her oaths on the Shelton Bible. There’s proof on the opening page inside. In black pen, Harris wrote that on Jan. 3, 2011, and Jan. 5, 2015, she was sworn in “on this beloved Bible” as attorney general of California, and on Jan. 3, 2017, to the U.S. Senate.
The last time it was returned to Smith, Harris delivered it in the velvet pouch.
“I take great pride in being the caretaker of this Bible,” Smith said, choking up in her hotel room in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday afternoon. “I had no idea that this would end up being a history-making Bible. It’s an honor and a privilege to deliver it personally.”