Kamala Harris Sworn In as Vice President (2021)

CTL-E-5440 · Event · other · 2021

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in as Vice President of the United States on the West Front of the Capitol, taking the oath from Justice Sonia Sotomayor and becoming — in the intake timeline's exact framing — the first woman and the first Black person, and also the first South Asian American, to hold the office. Harris, the former district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California, and United States senator, had been elected on the Democratic ticket with Joseph R. Biden in November 2020. She took the oath using two Bibles, one belonging to Regina Shelton, a childhood neighbor she called a second mother, and one that had belonged to Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice and a Harris hero. As vice president she held the Senate's tie-breaking vote, casting more of them than any predecessor in the era of the fifty-fifty chamber. Harris herself is held at CTL-E-1481, a sixteen-word stub the audit flagged; this record holds the milestone event, so the graph can cite January 20, 2021, as the date the timeline says it is.

The record

• Also known as: Kamala Harris Vice Presidential Inauguration, Harris Becomes Vice President

Notes

Statistics: Sworn in January 20, 2021 (Britannica; NARA). The intake paste's stop #44 (2021) is VERIFIED, including its 'first woman and first Black US Vice President' framing. Staged edge: related_to Kamala Harris, CTL-E-1481 — whose stub state (16 words) the audit flagged as an enrichment candidate. · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: The record's details are chosen for citation: the justice who swore her, the two Bibles, the tie-breaking arithmetic. Milestones flatten into trivia unless the record keeps their texture — a neighbor's Bible and Thurgood Marshall's, on the same hands, is the timeline's whole argument in one image. · Photo slot: HELD — no rights-cleared image was verified for this record in the merge run's bounded Commons sweep (2026-10-15); slot stays HELD until a cleared image is obtained (commons upload, public-domain government portrait, or CTL original), per CTL-PHOTO-001.

Relationships

• Kamala Harris — related to
  This event record documents Kamala Harris's (CTL-E-1481) swearing-in as Vice President on January 20, 2021 (Britannica; National Archives).

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Kamala Harris' — supports: the January 20, 2021 swearing-in, her firsts (first woman, first Black, first South Asian vice president), and her prior offices
• National Archives / Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies — supports: the inauguration date and Justice Sotomayor's administering of the vice presidential oath (primary source)
• Smithsonian Institution / contemporary reporting — supports: the two Bibles (Regina Shelton's and Thurgood Marshall's) used at the swearing-in

Record CTL-E-5440 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 3 sources (1 primary) · 1 mapped relationship · CTL research: BCI-001.
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