24 Hours With Vice President Kamala Harris

Breonna Randall has never seen the vice president speak. The twenty-somethingcollege senior is sitting in the front row of Cramton Auditorium at Howard University, where she's a month from graduation. In a few minutes, alumna Kamala Harris will approach the lectern in the same auditorium in which she attended freshman orientation 40 years ago, but befitted differently from her collegiate days, in a navy pantsuit and her signature black pearls. "We all love homecomings, don't we?" she says to the group of about 100, who've gathered in honor of an expanded Small Business Administration program. "And this is a homecoming for me to be on this stage," she adds. "In many ways, this is where it all started."

Like Harris, Randall hails from California, which is where she cast a ballot for then-Senator Harris in the 2020 Democratic primaries. At the time, the Los Angeles native was enrolled at Howard but taking classes remotely. "Being a [Howard] student, you hear so much about how people don't view historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like predominantly white institutions (PWIs), but now you can't say that, because our vice president went to an HBCU," says Randall, who's back on campus in Washington, D.C., and covering this March 30 event for the college's news service. "There's a lot of pride in knowing that she came from where I came from. It all just seems possible."

In my 24 hours shadowing Harris, these types of statements surfaced organically around her. The night before, she hosted her largest reception to date at her home in honor of Women's History Month. "Pretty much every day I think, ‘That's a big deal,'" said Jennifer Klein, co-chair and executive director of the White House Gender Policy Council, of having a woman vice president. "It doesn't get old."

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In a short speech, Harris nodded to current challenges like Russia's war on Ukraine and stateside maternal mortality, while also looking toward a new era, one in which women will have outsize leadership roles compared to previous generations. "We will not be shamed into talking about things like fibroids," she said during a section about gender-specific health disparities. The crowd laughed. "We'll talk about it!"

During the speech, about a dozen U.S. representatives arrived and tucked into the crowd, including Reps. Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, Debbie Dingell, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia, and Lois Frankel. The vice president announced them to cheers.