Toxic workplace, plagiarism, border crisis: 5 Kamala Harris controversies since 2020
MLK plagiarism allegation
In an October 2020 interview with Elle, Harris shared a story her mother told her about an incident from her early childhood.
According to Harris, she was in a stroller at a civil rights march in California when she was a toddler. Due to the absence of straps, she fell out of the stroller, and her parents initially didn't notice she was missing.
"My mother tells the story about how I'm fussing," Harris told Elle, "and she's like, 'Baby, what do you want? What do you need?' And I just looked at her, and I said, 'Fweedom.'"
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By January 2021, critics noted that the anecdote strongly resembled a comment that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave to Alex Haley in his 1965 interview.
"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. 'What do you want?' the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, 'Fee-dom,'" King stated.
The left-leaning fact check site Snopes investigated the plagiarism accusation, concluding that it was "unable to determine that Harris, who heard the account from her now-deceased mother, deliberately plagiarized it from King."
