Kamala Harris accused of stealing ‘fweedom’ story from MLK interview in Playboy

In October, Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed she told her mother that she wanted “fweedom” when she was a child and had just fallen out of her stroller at a civil rights march in Oakland, California, in an interview with ELLE magazine where she appeared on the cover.

Activist Andray Domise pointed out that Harris’ story was lifted from a January 1965, Playboy interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about a girl in Birmingham, Alabama.

In the interview Dr. King said, “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. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered ‘Fee-dom.’ She couldn’t even pronounce it but she knew. It was beautiful!”

In Harris’ Elle interview she tells the following story.

“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.'”

This isn’t the first time Harris has been accused of telling stories from her childhood that weren’t her own. She tweeted Kwanzaa celebrations being “one of her childhood memories,” but this raised some eyebrows as there was evidence that those celebrations likely never happened.

“You know, my sister and I, we grew up celebrating Kwanzaa. Every year, our family…  and our extended family, we would gather around across multiple generations. And we would tell stories. The kids would sit on the carpet and the elders would sit on chairs, and we would light the candles and, of course, afterwards have a beautiful meal.”

Kwanzaa was only established in 1966, two years after Harris’s 1964 birthdate, yet she claimed that her family celebrated it “across multiple generations.”

Evidence emerged that Harris celebrated Christmas as a child.

Vice President Mike Pence previously accused Senator Harris and her running mate Joe Biden of plagiarizing the Trump administration’s COVID plan during the Vice Presidential debate in 2020.