Kamala Harris Accused of Stealing Childhood Story from Martin Luther King Jr.

Kamala Harris retells a compelling story from her childhood nearly verbatim to an anecdote from Martin Luther King Jr. 56 years ago.

This October, in an interview with Elle Magazine, Kamala Harris recounted a personal story from her childhood, describing how her fight for racial justice began at a very young age.

Elle Magazine: Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young. She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller (few safety regulations existed for children’s equipment back then), and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset. “My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris says, “and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

After the interview resurfaced on Monday, Twitter users began to notice strange similarities between Harris’ story and an account given by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. more than five decades prior.

“I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother,” said King in a 1965 Playboy interview. “’What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’”

Harris joins her governing partner Joe Biden in having a personal anecdote questioned for its authenticity. In the winter of 2020, Biden admitted that he lied about being arrested during a congressional trip to South Africa in the 1970s.