Vice President Kamala Harris is descended from the 19th-century Irish slave owner Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in Jamaica, who recruited massive numbers of Irish migrants to Jamaica to work on his sugar plantations after the British Empire abolished slavery.
In this undated photo, Iris Finegan holds her
great granddaughter, Kamala Harris, in Jamaica. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP)
/ AP
The Harris family's slave-holding history is confirmed by her father, Donald J. Harris an economics professor at Stanford University who is the son of an English white man, Joseph Alexander Harris.
Donald Harris, Kamala’s father, wrote the following in a lengthy essay for Jamaica Global Online of his family’s history:
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural “produce” exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).”