Kamala Harris Accused of Plagiarizing Childhood Story From Martin Luther King Jr.

If the Kamala Harris anecdote about being at a civil rights rally when she was just a stroller bound child sounds familiar, that’s because she may have lifted it from a Martin Luther King Jr. interview.

From Fox News:

Harris has repeatedly boasted of her parents’ involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the Elle interview, she recalled accompanying them to marches as a toddler in a stroller.

“Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young,” writer Ashley C. Ford led off the piece. “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 … 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 told the magazine. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

She also told this story/lie back in June.

But one eagle eyed Twitter user noticed that the Harris tale sounds remarkably similar to a 1965 interview King did for Playboy.

“I will never 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,” King said in the interview. “‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’ She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations, the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.”

This isn’t the first time Harris has faced accusations of fabricating tales of her childhood. Last month, she publicly celebrated the little-known African-American holiday of Kwanzaa, boasting that she had fond “childhood memories” of her family gathering “across multiple generations” and telling stories while they lit candles.

But as conservative commentator Matt Walsh pointed out, Kwanzaa wasn’t even invented until two years after Harris was born, making it unlikely that she would have a “deep childhood attachment” to the holiday.

Somehow I find it hard to believe that she has a deep childhood attachment to a holiday that didn’t exist when she was born https://t.co/037S09KqxP

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 27, 2020

Of course, former Vice President Joe Biden has been dogged by his own issues of plagiarism.

During his first bid for president in 1987, Biden was forced to end his campaign after it was revealed he plagiarized the speech of a British Labour Party politician during a primary debate, with other examples of him borrowing from other politicians coming to light in the days afterwards.

The plagiarism was not an isolated incident for Biden, who had been accused of plagiarizing material going all the way back to his days in law school.

“I made some mistakes,” Biden told the media while announcing the end of his campaign. “But now, the exaggerated shadow of those mistakes has begun to obscure the essence of my candidacy and the essence of Joe Biden.”