SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) – Rachel Dolezal carefully constructed a life as a black civil rights activist in the last decade in the inland Northwest, but that world is falling apart following the disclosure by her parents that she was a white woman who for years has posed as African-American.
Dolezal has resigned as president of the local branch of the NAACP, lost her position as a part-time African studies instructor at a local university, lost her job as a freelance newspaper columnist and become the subject of a probe by the city Ethics Commission.
The furor has touched off national debate over racial identity and divided the NAACP itself.
“In the eye of this current storm, I can see that a separation of family and organizational outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP,” Dolezal, who was elected the Spokane chapter’s president last fall, wrote on the group’s Facebook page Monday. “Please know I will never stop fighting for human rights.”
Dolezal, a 37-year-old woman with a light brown complexion and dark curly hair, graduated from historically black Howard University and was married to a black man. For years, she publicly described herself as black and complained of being the victim of racial hatred in the heavily white region.