ATLANTA — Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris invoked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Sunday during a youth day service at the civil rights icon’s pastoral home of Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The California Democrat referenced how King was only 26 at the start of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama.
“We stand on the shoulders of great men and women who came before us and I think of it as being a relay race, young leaders, where they came before us, and they were running the relay race, and they had the baton, and then they passed that baton to us,” Harris, 54, said. “And the question for our lives will be, what do we do during that period of time?”
The former California attorney general joked that established leaders also should recognize when to hand off to the next generation, which doubled as a thinly veiled swipe at some of her top 2020 rivals: former Vice President Joe Biden, 76; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77; and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 69.
“And, I’ll just say to the older leaders, that it also becomes question of let’s also know when to pass the baton,” Harris said.
The daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, the Oakland native touched on her parents’ active role in the civil rights movement, saying she was raised by “adults who spent full time marching and shouting.”
“We know that we still have a fight for justice in our country,” she said, alluding to economic and criminal justice issues. “We see injustice when we know in America today parents have to sit down with their son when he turns 12 years old and have the talk, and explain to him how he may be stopped, arrested, chased, or even shot because of the color of his skin.”
Harris, who announced her White House bid in January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, repeated advice she often gives young people on the campaign trail, urging them to be “unburdened” by history.
“We are a nation that is aspirational in nature,” she said. “We are also clear-eyed. We have never yet met those ideals, but our strength is that we fight to reach them.”
Harris currently places third in the RealClearPolitics average of polls for 2020 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination. With 10 percent support, Harris trails only Biden (29.6 percent), and Sanders (24.2 percent).
