Posted on January 8, 2021

Kamala Harris Appears to Repeatedly Plagiarize MLK Anecdote

Emily Jacobs, New York Post, January 5, 2021

A story Vice President-elect Kamala Harris told in a months-old magazine interview about her childhood has resurfaced after readers noticed parallels to a story told by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965.

Speaking to Elle magazine for its October cover story, Harris detailed a time when she became separated from her parents at a civil rights march in Oakland, Calif.

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“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing, and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom,’” Harris told the magazine.

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The interview, while months old, resurfaced on Twitter this week when multiple users noticed the uncanny similarities the story had to one told by MLK during a January 1965 interview with Playboy magazine.

In the piece, the civil rights icon recalled a moment he witnessed between a young black girl and a white police officer.

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“‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom,’” he continued.

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