As speculation mounted about her chances of being tapped as Joe Biden's running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., began introducing some eye-catching legislation. One measure boosted research for uterine fibroids, a condition that threatens pregnancies and disproportionately affects Black women. Another toughened a measure to ban police chokeholds following the killing of George Floyd. In the same stretch, she used her Senate perch to push for greater voting access. All those issues are of deep concern to the Black activists whose skepticism of Harris helped doom her own presidential campaign but who were gaining influence in the Democratic Party amid a season of racial reckoning. Harris turned to some of those activists, meeting with them repeatedly as she crafted the Senate provisions. And by the time Biden was in the final throes of his arduous selection process, many of the same critics who had looked with suspicion at Harris's past work as a prosecutor were suddenly pulling for her as a fellow Black woman. "Senator Harris has reflected that had she had the opportunity to make certain choices that she made back in the '90s when she was the district attorney, if she had the opportunity to make those choices in the Black Lives Matter era, more than 20 years later, that may have shifted," said Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Garza said she met with Harris for over an hour and discussed "some of the challenges of this moment, some of the policy that we needed to see her champion in this moment, and it was an important and a good meeting," Garza said. It helps, she added, that Harris suggested she might not embrace the same policies today. The coming together of Harris and her former critics marked an extraordinary behind-the-scenes...