Nikki Haley 2024: What to know about ex-Trump ambassador trends now

With her announcement Tuesday, Republican Nikki Haley hopes to become the nation's first female president. 

Throughout her political career, Haley, 51, has racked up a number of firsts. 

She was the first female governor of South Carolina, the first minority governor of South Carolina and the first female-minority combo governor in the United States. 

Haley was also, at one point, the youngest governor in the country.  

When her husband Michael Haley deployed to Afghanistan in 2013, she became the first governor in U.S. history to have a spouse deployed. 

And growing up, Haley came from the first Indian-American family in her tiny, South Carolina town.  

Haley was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa on January 20, 1972 - which happens to be the date presidents are inaugurated - to Raj and Ajit Randhawa, Indian immigrants from Punjab, who worked as teachers and ran a successful foreign goods business called Exotica International Inc.

Her mother, Raj, lost her father at a young age, but came from a wealthy family. She met Ajit at a mountain vacation area near Dharamsala, India, finding him 'a good-looking man,' and their parents decided they could be married. 

Haley's father Ajit got a PhD from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada - marking his first time living in North America.

'He left India for the new world with eight dollars in his pocket,' Haley recalled in her 2012 book, Can't Is Not An Option. 

And then Ajit landed a job as an associate professor of biology at Voorhes College, a historically black college, in Denmark, South Carolina. 

He and Raj arrived in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969, with Haley recounting in her book how much trouble they had finding housing. 

'When it came time for my parents to find a home, no one would rent to them,' Haley said. 'Word quickly got around that my father worked at the "black school," and besides that, he and my mom were obviously foreigners themselves.' 

They eventually had to buy a house in the tiny town of Bamberg, South Carolina, a town of 2,500 people located between Columbia and Charleston. 

'When they finally found a house they had to buy it, not rent it. And they were told there were conditions: They couldn't entertain black people in it. They couldn't have alcohol in it. And they had to sell it back to the man they bought it from,' she wrote. 

Haley was born and raised in Bamberg. 

'The railroad tracks divided the town by race. I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants - not black, not white - I was different,' she recalled in her campaign announcement video, released Tuesday. 'But my mom would always say your job is not to focus on the differences, but the similarities and my parents reminded me and my siblings every day how blessed we were to live in America.' 

In Can't Is Not An Option, Haley suggested being the only Indian-American in a small southern town wasn't easy.

She recalled how in kindergarten, for the Thanksgiving play, she was cast as Pocahontus. 

'To this day, I'm not sure what my teachers were thinking. Did they realize I wasn't that kind of Indian?' she wrote. 

In another instance, Haley recallls being disqualified - and given a beach ball as a consolation prize - from a beauty pageant, because judges didn't know if she fit in the white or black category and didn't want 'either race to get upset.'  

Haley had early memories of her parents, devout Sikh, being pushed to convert to Christianity by Bamberg's residents - something Haley did herself later in life. 

She also recalled being the smartest kid in the class - so much that at the end of first grade her school moved her to second grade so she could start third grade in the fall. 

Haley attended the highly-ranked Clemson University and studied textile management and later accounting, explaining in her book that politics wasn't talked about at home and she never would have thought of taking a political science class. 

She met the man she would marry, William Michael 'Bill'

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