Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is being accused of plagiarism after repeatedly using a line similar to one offered by Martin Luther King.
In an October Elle magazine cover story, Harris told an anecdote from her childhood.
"My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to me and asked, 'Kamala, what's wrong? What do you want?' And I wailed back, 'Fweedom,'" Harris wrote in her 2010 book "Smart on Crime."
In using the term "Fweedom," Harris used a term similar to the "Fee-dom" uttered by King in 1965, per Fox News.
"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 told Playboy magazine. "‘What do you want?' the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, 'Fee-dom.'"
After noticing similarities between the Harris and King stories, people took to social media to express their thoughts.
"So it turns out Kamala Harris lifted her 'Fweedom' story from a 1965 Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, by Alex Haley. Much thanks to @EngelsFreddie for spotting the similarity,” Q. Anthony (ɔpɛ asem) wrote on Twitter.
"Does Harris’ evocation of the need for 'fweedom' grapple with any of the issues that were driving King’s activism before his death? Does her career in public life suggest she understands and cares deeply about systemic poverty and racial inequality?," wrote @della_morte_ on Twitter.
Harris also demanded "Fweedom!" in her 2019 book "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey."
In the Elle interview, Harris recalled accompanying her parents to civil rights marches as a toddler in a stroller. Again, a similar storyline to the one King told.
"Senator Kamala Harris started her life's work young," writer Ashley C. 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 ... 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."
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