In July 2024, following U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris stepping into the spotlight as a contender in the 2024 presidential race, a photo went viral on multiple platforms that people claimed depicted Harris in the 1980s.
We looked into the claim, and found that Harris' 2024 presidential campaign uses the photo on merchandise. Also, in a video uploaded to her official YouTube channel in October 2020 (a post titled "Kamala Harris Reacts to Old Photos"), Harris herself confirmed the photo's authenticity. For those reasons, we rated the claim "True."
While the photographer is unknown, Harris said in the YouTube video the photo was taken when she was a student at Howard University 1980s. Around the 1:17-minute mark, she held up a screen with the photo, saying:
"So, this is a photograph when I was joining my sorority during a particularly active week in front of Rankin Chapel, that's where we are here. Where we would go every Sunday for services," Harris said in the video. "One of my name's was 'C-Cubed,' for cool, calm, and collected."
In November 2020, a local ABC station in Louisville, Kentucky, used the photo in a story about Harris in which journalists interviewed members of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), the sorority Harris pledged to while attending Howard University. While she graduated from Howard in 1986, she remains a lifelong member of AKA to this day.
The program featured two photos depicting Harris, including the in-question image. The photos were seemingly taken around the same time, as she wore the same coat and looked similar in both images.
A few months later, a Facebook account dedicated to "Black fraternity and sorority culture and news" posted the two photos with the caption, "Kamala Harris pledging #AlphaKappaAlpha in the 1980s at #HowardUniversity."
(Facebook account @WatchTheYard)
Also, as of this writing, an online store that's part of her presidential bid features the photo on items such as shirts and stickers, along with photos from other stages of her life. For example, the store lists one item with the in-question photo as a "College Kamala Tee" for $32 (displayed below).
(Harris Official Store)
Her senior photo as a student at Howard University is also displayed on merchandise, and her appearance in that image looks similar to the photo in question.
(Howard University)
We reached out to both AKA and Harris' team for comment and will update this story if we receive a response. However, given that Harris herself confirmed the photo's authenticity in the 2020 YouTube video and the Harris campaign's official store for selling merchandise displays the photo on items, we have rated this claim as "True."