Vice President-elect Kamala Harris recalled a story from her childhood during an October interview with Elle Magazine that is almost identical to a story Martin Luther King Jr. told back in 1965.
Elle Magazine’s feature article opened with a heartfelt story that Harris told from her childhood: Harris was attending a civil rights march in Oakland, California as a very young girl. Seated in a stroller, Harris said that she fell out of it at one point, unbeknownst to the adults caught up in the protest.
“By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset,” the article reads. “‘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.’”
Harris’s story is also told in her 2010 book “Smart on Crime” as well as her book published in 2019 titled “The Truths We Hold,” according to writer Cameron Cawthorne.
This story is very similar is similar to a part of writer Alex Haley’s MLK interview published by Playboy over 50 years earlier, Twitter users pointed out on Monday. During the interview, MLK recalled “a moment” where a young black girl was “accosted” by a white policeman during a demonstration.
Read this too-perfect Kamala Harris story. Then click on this 1965 Alex Haley interview with MLK and search for the word "fee-dom" (h/t @andraydomise): https://t.co/x1Kj2010OR https://t.co/1S50ac9Q5L
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) January 4, 2021
MLK said that the girl looked the policeman in the eye and told him she wanted “fee-dom.”
“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,” MLK recalled during the interview.
“‘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,” MLK continued. “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.”
Harris’s communications team did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller by press time.
Story cited here.
