NAACP GAL’S ‘ WHITE’ SUIT
Charged black college with bias
The embattled NAACP leader accused of spending years pretending to be a black woman once sued Howard University— because she claimed the school discriminated against her for being white.
Rachel Dolezal — who quit her post as president of the NAACP’s Spokane, Wash., chapter Monday — insisted that she lost out on teaching opportunities and scholarship money because of her white skin, according to court documents.
Dolezal, 37, using her married name, Rachel Moore, filed the suit in Washington, DC’s Superior Court in 2002, the same year she graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts from Howard, a historically black university.
The lawsuit alleged she was denied a teaching-assistant gig, a postgraduate position as an instructor, and scholarship aid because of the discrimination she suffered.
She also claimed her artwork was taken down because she was white.
“Moore alleged that the decision of Dean Benjamin of Howard to remove some of her artworks from a February 2001 student exhibition was motivated by a discriminatory purpose to favor AfricanAmerican students over Moore,” read the court documents, first revealed by The Smoking Gun.
The case was tossed in 2004, after the court found no evidence she had ever been discriminated against.
The Washington, DC, school refused to comment, saying it considers “this matter closed.”
As a graduate student, Dolezal incorporated black subjects in her artwork — but professors said it was always very clear she was a white student.
“She was a blueeyed blond woman,” David Smedley, her Howard thesis adviser, told The Washington Post.
Around 2007, she began posing as a black woman, telling some people her father was black, her parents revealed last Friday. Her parents have said she is of Czech, Swedish and German descent.
“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 posted Monday on the Spokane chapter’s Facebook page.
“This is not me quitting; this is a continuum,” she added.
Her parents, Ruth and Lawrence Dolezal, blasted their daughter as unapologetic, saying she “neglects to face the deceptions that she documented about her ethnicity, or to offer an apology for her dishonest representation of her heritage.”
Meanwhile, Dolezal is no longer employed by Eastern Washington University, where she held a parttime teaching position in the Africana Studies Department, the school said.