Kamala Harris accused of having ‘lifted’ anecdote from MLK in childhood ‘fweedom’ story

Harris has often spoken of her parents’ efforts in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and in the profile tells how she accompanied them as a toddler to a march in Oakland, California.

“Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young,” journalist Ashley Ford wrote. “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 said. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

On Monday, Twitter users @EngelsFreddie and Andray Domise, a contributing editor at Canadian news magazine Maclean’s, pointed to a similar story recalled by King during an interview with Alex Haley for Playboy magazine in 1965. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize one year earlier.

“I never will 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. “’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! 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.”

Domise charged that Harris “lifted” her account from King, which other users similarly noted.

“Read this too-perfect Kamala Harris story,” wrote former New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss. “Then click on this 1965 Alex Haley interview with MLK and search for the word ‘fee-dom.'”

Harris has referenced a similar anecdote on other occasions, including in the preface to her 2010 book, Smart on Crime, where she writes of her “stroller’s eye view” of the civil rights movement unfolding around her in Berkeley and Oakland, where she lived.

“My early memories are of a sea of legs marching around the streets and the sounds of shouting. The conversations in our apartment in the Berkeley flatlands area on Bancroft Avenue would go late into the night, and, of course, we picked up the language of the movement,” Harris explains. “My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to ask me, ‘Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?’ and I wailed back, ‘Fweedom.'”

In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, released shortly before she announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Harris repeats the story.

Articles in Mother Jones and the Atlantic also include Harris’s memory of calling out for “fweedom.”

A spokesperson for Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.