Kamala Harris will watch Tuesday’s election night from the campus of Howard University — her alma mater — a fitting place for possibly the most significant night of her life.
Nicknamed “the Black Harvard,” the Washington school occupies a central role in the US vice president’s biography: Since graduating there in 1986, she has frequently returned at key moments.
“Howard University is one of the most important aspects of my life,” she said in 2019 as a candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries, “and it is where I first ran for my first elected office,” as a student council representative.
“So this is where it all began.”
Her presence there Tuesday night — when Harris could become the first Black woman to be elected US president — is thus deeply symbolic.
The US Congress founded Howard in 1867, two years after the Civil War had put an end to slavery in the mostly Southern states where it remained legal.
The school took its name from Oliver Howard, a Northerner known as “the Christian general” who had promoted higher education for freed slaves.
Howard has built a reputation as one of the best of the roughly 100 institutions known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), which draw mostly Black and minority students.
The campus of Howard, which has around 11,000 students, features several imposing red-brick buildings with traditional white columns arrayed around a large central lawn commonly known as The Yard.
It was in an amphitheater there that, in mid-August, Kamala Harris prepared for her lone debate against Republican rival Donald Trump — telling students that someday, “you might be running for president of the United States.”
Celebrity graduates
Among Howard’s most illustrious graduates have been author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, and famed civil rights leader Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first Black justice appointed to the US Supreme Court.
It was Marshall’s example, Harris later said, that inspired the future lawyer to choose Howard for her university studies in 1982.
There she joined the debate club and took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations.
She also joined Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), one of the nation’s largest sororities, founded at Howard in 1908.
AKA makes no presidential endorsements, but its national membership of some 300,000 has given Harris a far-reaching network of activist supporters.