In a recent interview with Elle magazine, Kamala Harris — slated to become the future vice-president of the United States if today’s electoral challenge from Republicans fails — mentioned a childhood story that allegedly happened at a human rights march. However, it turned out that in 1965, Martin Luther King, the late Black rights activist, told an almost identical story.
As Daily Mail reports, Harris now faces accusations that she plagiarized the story from King to please her voters. Harris told the newspaper how she had been taken by her parents in a stroller to a human rights march as a small girl. She allegedly dropped out of the stroller at one point, and her parents only noticed it after a while. “My mother told me how irritated I was then, how she asked me, ‘Honey, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I looked at her and said, ‘Freedom’.“ But as it turned out recently, the story is strikingly similar to what Martin Luther King told in an interview with Playboy magazine as early as 1965.
“I will never forget one moment in Birmingham when a white police officer stopped a black girl, she was about seven or eight, who was at a demonstration with her mother. “What do you want?” the policeman asked harshly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Freedom!“ King said. “She couldn’t even say it, but she knew what it was about. It was wonderful!“ King remarked then. The chances of Harris taking the story from King are highly probable. At the same time, it is virtually impossible that Harris was the young girl seen at the protest he referenced. By the time King gave the interview, Harris would have been about a year old, and King mentioned that the girl was significantly older. In addition, both protests took place in different cities. The story aroused a wave of criticism and ridicule towards the future vice president. “No one is shocked and no one in the mainstream media will cover it,” wrote Donald Trump Jr., the son of the current president, on Twitter. “If Kamala is willing to lie and steal a life story from Martin Luther King… what won’t she lie about???” asked comedian Tim Young.
This is not the first time Kamala Harris has been accused of lying. In February 2019, she claimed on the radio show “The Breakfast Club” that she smoked marijuana in college and listened to the music of American rappers Snoop Dog and Tupac. Harris graduated from college in 1989, but Snoop Dog did not release his first album until 1993, and Tupac released his first album again in 1991. In September last year, Harris also named Tupac “the greatest living rapper,” but Tupac died in 1996. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris speaks during an introduction of President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del., Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
