U.S.

Rachel Dolezal Resigns From N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane

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Rachel A. Dolezal at her home in Spokane, Wash., in March. Colin Mulvany/The Spokesman-Review, via Associated Press 
A few years before she began claiming to be black, an N.A.A.C.P. official who now stands accused of deceiving people about her race apparently sued a historically black university, charging that it had discriminated against her — in part for being white.
On Monday, Rachel A. Dolezal gave up her post as president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane, Wash., amid a storm of national scrutiny and ridicule. She had said for years that her background was partly black, but last week her parents began telling reporters that she has no black ancestry.
In 2002, Ms. Dolezal received a master of fine arts degree from Howard University, the historically black school in Washington, D.C. That same year, a woman named Rachel Moore, Ms. Dolezal’s married name at the time, filed a lawsuit against Howard, first reported Monday by The Smoking Gun, saying that as a graduate student there she had faced discrimination based on her gender, her pregnancy and her race — white.
A person familiar with the case, who was not authorized to speak for the record, said that Ms. Dolezal and Ms. Moore were one and the same.
The District of Columbia’s Superior Court dismissed the lawsuit, a decision that was upheld in 2005 by the Court of Appeals. Howard declined to comment, aside from confirming that she earned her degree there.
By about 2008, Ms. Dolezal had moved West and was telling people that she was black or partly black. Officials at the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane, and at the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she had previously worked, said she had also represented herself to them as being partly of black descent. It was a claim she also made in news media interviews and in an application to the City of Spokane for a seat on the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, to which Mayor David A. Conton appointed her last year.
In a joint statement on Monday, the mayor and Ben Stuckart, president of the Spokane City Council, said, “We have referred the matter to the city’s ethics commission for a determination as to whether the answers she gave on her application for the volunteer position violated the city’s code of ethics.”
Officials also confirmed on Monday that even before questions were raised about her race, the city had started an unrelated investigation into Ms. Dolezal. That inquiry, first reported by The Spokesman-Review newspaper, “relates to her behavior on the commission,” said Brian Coddington, a city spokesman, but he declined to elaborate.
“That began on May 4, it’s completely separate, and it’s being done by an independent investigator,” he said.
Attempts to reach Ms. Dolezal by phone and email were unsuccessful.
Ms. Dolezal, 37, has been an instructor in the Africana Studies Program at Eastern Washington University, where she is hired on a quarter-by-quarter basis. On Monday, a university spokesman, Brian Meany, said that her position had ended with the end of the spring quarter on Friday and that “she is no longer employed by the university.”
When the news of Ms. Dolezal’s apparent deceit rose to national attention last week, Monday was expected to bring a reckoning of some kind, at a previously scheduled meeting of the Spokane N.A.A.C.P. chapter.
But on Sunday, a post on the chapter’s Facebook page said, “Due to the need to continue discussion with regional and national N.A.A.C.P. leaders, tomorrow’s meeting is postponed and will be rescheduled for a later date.” That angered some chapter officials, who said Ms. Dolezal did not have the unilateral authority to postpone the meeting.
Chapter members started an online petition and called for Ms. Dolezal to step aside. The N.A.A.C.P. has had many white officials over the years, and critics said the issue was not Ms. Dolezal’s race, but her credibility.
Early Monday morning, Ms. Dolezal posted a statement to the chapter’s Facebook page, saying, “It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the N.A.A.C.P. that I step aside from the presidency and pass the baton to my vice president, Naima Quarles-Burnley.”
The national president of the N.A.A.C.P., Cornell William Brooks, released a statement that did not take a position on Ms. Dolezal, but cast her story as a distraction from bigger issues. “The NAACP is not concerned with the racial identity of our leadership but the institutional integrity of our advocacy,” it said.
Ms. Dolezal’s parents, who live in Montana, have said that they had known for seven or eight years that their daughter was misrepresenting herself, but had not said so publicly until last week, when reporters began asking them.
Lawrence and Rutheanne Dolezal, who are estranged from their daughter, say that her ancestry is overwhelmingly white, with a small fraction being Native American — but not black. They produced photos of her as a fair-skinned teenager with freckles and straight blond hair — a marked contrast to her recent appearance.
Over the years, Ms. Dolezal had reported a number of incidents of racially motivated harassment and intimidation, both in Spokane and in Coeur d’Alene, some of which had been greeted with considerable skepticism. Those reports did not yield any arrests, and law enforcement investigations into them had been suspended before new questions were raised about her last week.
Kirk Johnson contributed reporting.