“Jamaicans are called arrogant, but it is really a confidence and pride in knowing that we come from African kings and queens,” Walker said. “We have the audacity to believe that we can do anything.”

AP

AP

With just five days to go until the Nov. 5 election, Harris is making a strong push to become the first woman and the first Asian American to be elected president of the United States.

While her narrative leans heavily on the influence of her Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan, Harris’ father is a renowned economist born and raised in a tiny parish on the northern coast of Jamaica. Although she was not born there, Harris’ achievements have energized the Jamaican community, which views her as part of who they are and strive to be.

‘Proud of our own’

Georgia’s Jamaican community is relatively small. Just 0.7% of the state’s population — or about 75,000 residents — report they are of Jamaican ancestry, according to the most recent five-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

But there are also vibrant pockets of Jamaicans in places you might not expect.

They make up about 3% of Newton County, east of Atlanta, ranking it fourth in the nation among counties with the largest percent of residents claiming Jamaican ancestry. It trails only the Bronx and Brooklyn in New York City and Broward County, Florida.

In the five core metro Atlanta counties, about 48,000 out of the 4.3 million people living in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton and Gwinnett counties identify as Jamaican.

“We are proud of our own,” said Evette Taylor-Reynolds, president of the Atlanta Jamaican Association. “She is a part of our diaspora. We see within her the strength that we are as a nation.”

Grahampurse

Grahampurse

Civil rights ties

Widely known as a vacation hub, Jamaica was also the home of civil rights activist Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association; reggae pioneer Bob Marley; and a host of Olympians, including Usain Bolt, Merlene Ottey and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Jamaica in 1965, three years after the island nation gained independence from the United Kingdom.

“In Jamaica,” King said in a speech in Kingston, “I feel like a human being.”

Walker, the producer and host of JWalkerBuzz— a Caribbean-themed television show based in Atlanta — is also the president of Caribbean Georgia Votes, a nonprofit aimed at mobilizing voters. He likens Harris’ popularity among Jamaicans to how African Americans in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s paid attention to celebrated Black people who started breaking through in white-dominated spaces, like Jackie Robinson, Ralph Bunche and Diahann Carroll.

“We have made a big deal out of it in the Jamaican media and Caribbean community,” he said. “In 2020, when (President Joe) Biden had her as his running mate, he locked up the Caribbean vote in Georgia just like that. And she now has an even stronger hold on it.”

Jason Walker

Jason Walker

Harris’ appeal to the Jamaican and Caribbean communities comes at a time when Trump continues to lean heavily into his anti-immigrant rhetoric in the closing days of the election.

The Trump camp advanced a long-debunked lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets, while also claiming that “the Congo” has emptied its prisons to allow violent criminals to come to the United States border as migrants.

Last week at a rally in New York City, a comedian who opened Trump’s rally called Puerto Rico — a U.S. territory in the Caribbean — a “floating island of garbage.”

Evette Taylor-Reynolds

Evette Taylor-Reynolds

Trump has famously questioned Harris’ racial identity, claiming that she just recently started identifying herself as Black for political expediency,

‘He taught me to be fearless’

Harris’ Caribbean roots have long played a role in how she presents herself as a Black woman even though her father, 86-year-old retired Stanford University economist Donald Harris has stayed out of the spotlight.

Donald Harris was born in Brown’s Town, a market town in St. Ann Parish about 60 miles from Kingston, Jamaica’s capital and largest city. Marley and Garvey were also born in towns in St. Ann Parish.

Brown’s Town, which has about 6,000 residents, is named after an Irish enslaver, Hamilton Brown, who is believed to have been an ancestor of Harris’ paternal great-grandmother Christiana Brown, known in the family as Miss Chrishy.

AP

AP

While the trans-Atlantic slave trade is mostly associated with its impact on North America, it is estimated that only about 388,000 of the 12 million enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage landed in the United States. An estimated 935,000 were shipped to Jamaica.

Today, more than 75% of the island’s 2.7 million population are of African descent.

In 1961, Donald Harris immigrated to the United States to attend the University of California, Berkeley. He and Gopalan, Harris’ mother, married in 1963, and Kamala Harris was born a year later.

As a child in the 1970s, Kamala Harris and her younger sister, Maya, visited Brown’s Town often.

In a 2018 essay called “Reflections of a Jamaican Father,” Donald Harris wrote that one of his fondest memories was bringing his daughters to his homeland in 1970, where they “trudged through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, uphill and downhill, along narrow unkempt paths, to the very end of the family property, all in my eagerness to show to the girls the terrain over which I had wandered daily for hours as a boy.”

Harris shared her own memories in a 2021 interview with the Washington Post.

“My father, like so many Jamaicans, has immense pride in our Jamaican heritage and instilled that same pride in my sister and me,” she said. “We love Jamaica. He taught us the history of where we’re from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people and the richness of the culture.”

Harris’ parents divorced in 1972. Donald Harris has written that it was at that point that his interactions with his daughters came to an “abrupt halt.” After a difficult custody battle, he wrote that he lost because he was “a neegroe from da eyelans” who “might just end up eating his children for breakfast!”

Kamala Harris rarely talks about her father. But in her acceptance speech at the DNC, she spoke of how “he taught me to be fearless.”

The Jamaican brand

Donald Harris lives in the Washington, D.C., area, but he still looms large in Jamaica.

In the mid-’90s, after he retired from Stanford — where he was the school’s first Black professor of economics to receive tenure — Donald Harris returned to Jamaica. There, he helped transform the country’s economy, which was fueled by debt, into one sustained by an export-based model through public and private partnerships.

In 2013, a year after Harris’ economic policy was adopted, the island’s unemployment rate was 15%. Today it stands at 5.4% and has earned Donald Harris the country’s Order of Merit, a national honor that can only be held by 15 living people.

Jamaicans see Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, as carrying on her father’s work ethic, as well as the Jamaican practices of hard work, education and yes, fun.

“She is the epitome of what the Jamaican brand is — culture, music and education,” said Taylor-Reynolds, the former festival queen of Jamaica who moved to the United States in 1989 from Westmoreland Parish to go to college. “We brag that we gave the world reggae, jerk chicken and oxtails. Well, this is another gift to America.”

Last week, Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson was in his studio putting the final touches on one of his latest pieces. The prolific artist has three major pieces in Atlanta, including a statue of King in Vine City and the new John Lewis statue in Decatur.

Courtesy Basil Watson

Courtesy Basil Watson

In Jamaica, he has created busts for all of the country’s seven recognized national heroes. He has also created seven statues recognizing Jamaican Olympians that ring Jamaica’s National Stadium.

He said he would be ready to do at least one more if called.

“As a Jamaican, it is nice to think that someone of Jamaican heritage has risen so high. If, or when, she wins, it would be an honor, privilege and dream to do a statue of Kamala Harris,” said Watson, who moved to the United States in 2002 to extend his career as an artist. “Whom I expect to be the next president of the United States of America.”

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