Mayor Pushes for a Kamala Harris Statue in Brown’s Town, Jamaica: Video Report

November 4, 2024

The mayor of Brown’s Town, Cllr. Michael Belnavis expressed that he has known the Harris family for years because his business is next to their business, he went on to detail that the “Harris legacy is deep” in the area. As per the report, he’s pushing to honour Kamala with a statue in the centre of the town.

With many eyeing Vice President Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States of America and the first female president of the country, interest continues to deepen in her Jamaican and ethnic roots.

Harris’s possible selection as the first female president of the country will be decided on Tuesday. The Vice President was born in Oakland, California, to mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris and father Donald J. Harris.

Harris’s mother is of Indian descent, while her father, Donald, is of Afro-Jamaican descent and a native of Brown’s Town, St. Ann. Donald’s grandmother was a shop owner in Brown’s Town, and his family is said to have assisted in the building of the community’s Anglican Church in the 1800s.

While much is unknown about Donald, as he continues to live a private life, his Jamaican cousin, Mark Harris, described him as a calm and nice man. Speaking with Scripps News, Mark further expressed that Donald, who went on to become a professor at Stamford University, was a proponent of education and always eager to find out how they were doing in school.

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According to Scripps News, Donald attended the University of the West Indies Mona before migrating to America, where he met Harris’s mother. Despite starting a new life with his family in America, Harris’s father did not wish for him and his family to forget where they came from.

The professor expressed in his 2018 essay Reflections of a Jamaican Father that he was often told “memba whe yu cum fram,” and allowed his daughters, Kamala and Maya, to experience their heritage through trips to Jamaica. During their childhood trips to the island, Harris and her younger sister would explore the grounds of the Anglican Church as well as the local market.

Donald’s cousin, Sherman Harris, shared that the vice president enjoyed her childhood moments on the island, touring the family’s property and playing with animals.

“This is the playground of Kamala… She would actually play on these grounds with her father taking her to tour the property and so on. And she loved it. She played with the animals—the cows, the goats, and so on—and run up and down on the property,” Sherman said.

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Despite their fun-filled trips to Jamaica, according to Mark Harris, Donald stopped visiting Jamaica with the children during the 70s. It was around this time that Harris’s parents began experiencing marital issues.

While Harris has not visited Jamaica in years, Sherman said the vice president is very happy about her Jamaican heritage. “I think she is exuberant about it (Jamaica). I think that she is happy that she is from Jamaica and a part of her is from Jamaica because she loves Jamaica too.”

In regards to Donald Trump questioning the authenticity of Harris’s black ethnicity as she identifies as being a black woman instead of Indian, Sherman described Trump’s statements as “dump.” “Somebody can’t turn black or somebody can’t turn white, so I find it a dump speech,” Sherman stated.

Watch the video report on Harris and her family below.