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Did Kamala Harris lift Martin Luther King anecdote and make it her own?

The similarities between the stories seem too close to dismiss as coincidence. 

By World Israel News Staff

It appears that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris purloined an anecdote told by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and placed herself at the center of it in an interview with Elle Magazine published in October, Fox News reports.

The story Harris told Elle involved accompanying her parents to a civil rights march in the 1960s when she was still in a stroller. “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,” writes Ashley C. Ford in the Elle feature.

“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris tells Elle Magazine. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

Fox News reports that Twitter user @EngelsFreddie and Andray Domise, contributing editor of Canada’s Maclean’s, noted the similarity between Harris’s story and one King told in a 1965 Playboy interview.

“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.

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“‘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.”

Fox News included a number of comments on social media from those who agreed that the similarities between the two stories were too strong to dismiss.

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

Harris was also held up for ridicule at the end of December for a Kwanzaa holiday video she released. She spoke of growing up celebrating Kwanzaa as a child. Critics found it hard to believe that Harris, who was born in 1964, celebrated the holiday as a child when its observance only picked up in the 70s and 80s.