Fact Check: Rumors Claim Harris Plagiarized MLK. Here's What We Know

Claim:

An anecdote shared on multiple occasions by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris about her answer to the question, "What do you want?" as a toddler was plagiarized from a 1965 interview with Martin Luther King Jr.

Rating:

Unproven ( About this rating? )

Context:

Harris has repeatedly shared this anecdote she said she heard from her now-deceased mother: When asked, "What do you want?" as a toddler, Harris supposedly said, "Fweedom." King recounted a similar story in an 1965 interview with Playboy Magazine. Harris said she does not remember the alleged incident herself. There's no evidence to independently verify whether it actually happened or whether Harris (or her mother) plagiarized it.

In the weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris' political opponents resurfaced accusations that she plagiarized a story originally shared by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. Per the claims, she shared the allegedly stolen anecdote on multiple occasions — including while writing her 2009 book " Smart on Crime ."

For instance, an October 2024 clip by the UK-based streaming channel TalkTV said Harris is "accused of plagiarizing a story from Martin Luther King in the book that helped launch her political career, 'Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.'"

Did Harris plagiarize King? The answer is complicated. While it is true that their stories are similar, her anecdote was told to her by her mother, as Harris describes it.

Among places Harris shared the in-question story was a 2020 interview with Elle Magazine. That publication wrote:

[Harris] 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 says, "and she's like, 'Baby, what do you want? What do you need?' And I just looked at her and I said, 'Fweedom.'"

Decades earlier, in a 1965 interview with Playboy writer Alex Haley, King said:

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.' She couldn't even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful!

It's true that Harris has told the "Fweedom" story on multiple occasions. The earliest reported instance was in a 2004 interview with W Magazine.

It's also true that the anecdote appears in the preface to her 2009 book " Smart on Crime ." In that case, she omitted the detail about the incident supposedly happening at a civil rights rally. The book states, "My mother used to laugh when she told the story about the 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.'"

She referenced the story in the same way on page 8 of her 2019 book, "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey," as well as in a 2019 interview with Jimmy Fallon and interview on CSPAN .

In all cases, Harris described the story as something she heard from her mother, who died in 2009. Harris claims to have no direct recollection of the moment. Furthermore, there is no way to determine whether her mother pulled the anecdote from King's 1965 interview.

In mid-October 2024, Harris' campaign rejected broader accusations of plagiarism in her 2009 book. A campaign spokesperson told The Washington Post , "This is a book that's been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout."

Snopes reached out to the Harris campaign to specifically ask about the story that's similar to King's. The campaign declined to comment.