First woman. First Black American. First South Asian American. Three firsts, one raised hand — and a Bible that carried a fourth name with it: Thurgood Marshall.
On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in as the 49th Vice President of the United States. No woman had ever held the office. No Black American had ever held it. No South Asian American had ever held it. In a single oath, all three of those sentences stopped being true.
Two Bibles, and what each one said
Justice Sonia Sotomayor administered the oath. Harris swore on two Bibles — and the choice of those two books was itself a statement about where she came from and who paved the road.
One belonged to Regina Shelton, a family friend — the personal root, the woman from home. The other had belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice — the historical root, the man who had argued and then sat on the court that reshaped what American law promised people who looked like both of them.
Think about the symmetry. Marshall broke the Supreme Court’s color line as a justice. Decades later, his Bible was in the hands of the woman breaking the vice presidency’s lines of race and gender at the same time. History doesn’t always rhyme that neatly. This time, it did.
A ladder made entirely of firsts
Harris did not arrive at that oath from nowhere. Her path to it was a ladder where nearly every rung had the word “first” attached to it.
She was the first woman District Attorney of San Francisco. She was the first Black and the first South Asian Attorney General of California. And when she reached the U.S. Senate, she was only the second Black woman ever elected to it — a fact that says as much about how slowly those doors opened as it does about her.
Read that ladder the way a young girl reading this page would read it. Every single step, somebody had to be the first one through a door that had never opened for anyone like her — and then hold it long enough to climb to the next one.
The bookend only she could close
There is one more moment that completes the picture, and readers of this page have already seen its other half. As Vice President, Harris later presided over the confirmation vote of the first Black woman Supreme Court justice — Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose own story of firsts ran on this page earlier in this series.
Marshall’s Bible in her hand in 2021. The gavel over Jackson’s confirmation after that. The woman who swore in on a trailblazer’s Bible became, in the same term, part of the ceremony that seated the next trailblazer. Firsts, it turns out, are not solo events. Done right, they hand something forward.
Join the conversation
Two Bibles — one from a family friend, one from Thurgood Marshall. What does that choice tell you about her? And which of her firsts do you think will matter most to the girls watching today? Tell us below.
Source note: The account of Kamala Harris’s swearing-in on January 20, 2021 as the 49th Vice President — the first woman, first Black American and first South Asian American to hold the office — with Justice Sonia Sotomayor administering the oath and Harris swearing on two Bibles, one belonging to family friend Regina Shelton and one that had belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, is from the Miller Center (University of Virginia) and CNN inauguration coverage. Her ladder of firsts — first woman District Attorney of San Francisco, first Black and first South Asian Attorney General of California, and only the second Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate — is from her biography at kamalaharris.com. Her later role presiding over the confirmation vote of the first Black woman Supreme Court justice is part of that same record.
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