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Did Kamala Harris claim Martin Luther King Jr's civil rights story as her own? Trump Jr says 'no one is shocked'

Harris claimed in an interview what had happened while she participated in a civil rights march, but Internet soon found it was similar to a story MLK once told
UPDATED JAN 5, 2021
Kamala Harris, Martin Luther King Jr (Getty Images)
Kamala Harris, Martin Luther King Jr (Getty Images)

Social media went crazy since a claim by Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris went viral. Twitter users are in fact quite shocked to see the anecdote's similarity to one once shared by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. It is so eerily similar that many across social media think it might actually have been 'lifted'. In other words, plagiarized. Interestingly, the tale is about Harris' participation in the civil rights movement as a toddler!

In what appears to be an interview given to Elle magazine in October, 2020, Harris is quoted to be saying how she remembers that she was wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller. Harris' parents and her uncle were participating in the march. The stroller, as was expected in those days, had no straps and the little Harris fell from it at some point. Her parents and uncle, however, "caught up in the rapture of protest", kept on marching. By the time they noticed she was gone, the little child seemed to be very 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.’” Who knew the funny and pretty inspiring anecdote would find a twin in the civil rights movement's many stories?

In a Playboy magazine interview of January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr had shared an incident that took place in Birmingham, England. MLK had just won the Nobel Peace Prize at the time of the interview. The story was of another little girl. Another girl of color. Here's how it goes: "I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a White policeman accosted a little (N-word) 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!" Needless to say, MLK's 'feedom' and Harris' 'fweedom' sound pretty similar and it's a little improbable that Harris was in that Birmingham march, right?

Twitter users, especially Republicans, have been slamming Kamala Harris since discovering the similarities. Donald Trump Jr himself said: "No one is shocked and no one in the MSM will cover it". GOP's rapid response director Steve Guest, for instance, said, "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are two plagiarizing frauds. Biden plagiarized during law school and from RFK, Hubert Humphrey, JFK, and he stole the family history of a British politician. Now Kamala Harris plagiarized from MLK." Journalist Seth Mandel supported, saying, "Plagiarizing an MLK interview seems like the kind of thing you'll get caught on. Why do ppl do this to themselves?" Another user said: "Kamala Harris is a pathological liar and mediocre political talent who slept her way to power, flunked out of the primaries after garnering close to zero support, and was given the VP nod thanks solely to her race and gender. Other than that, she's an inspiration."

There were other users who joined in. One said, "Joe Biden lied about marching in the Civil Rights Movement and Kamala Harris stole one of MLK’s stories and told it as her own..." while another chimed in: "Kamala Harris tells a lie when she apparently lifted the 'Fweedom' tall tale from a 1965 Playboy interview with Martin Luther King JR. This is the type of people the DS wants in the White House! You just can’t make this stuff up!"



 



 



 



 



 



 

However, one would wonder, why an interview given just before the election go viral now, after the election is done and Biden-Harris have won?

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