SPOKANE, Wash. — Rachel Dolezal, the besieged Spokane chapter president of the NAACP who was outed by her family for fraudulently posing as a black person, resigned from her position Monday morning.
In a statement the chapter posted on Facebook on Monday, Dolezal wrote: “It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP that I step aside from the Presidency and pass the baton to my Vice President, Naima Quarles-Burnley.”
Dolezal was exposed as a born and bred Caucasian from Montana who had co-opted black culture and camouflaged her real physical and ethnic identity so that she could pass in society as a light-skinned African American woman. It worked for the better part of a decade. She attended esteemed historically black college, Howard University, in Washington, D.C. on a scholarship, before eventually moving to eastern Washington State where she began her new life under the pretense of being black.
She is currently a professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University and is president of a non-paid police oversight committee in addition to her former post as the NAACP president.
Some of Dolezal’s colleagues and contemporaries supported her even after she was exposed as a white woman living as a black lady. Others, however, demanded her suspension and/or ouster from the leadership position of the oldest Civil Rights organization in the country.
Some Spokane NAACP members began a petition over the weekend asking Dolezal to take a leave of absence, at the very least, while others planned to protest outside Monday’s meeting, which was cancelled.
Dolezal said in a statement that she will continue to advocate for civil and human rights.
“Please know I will never stop fighting for human rights and will do everything in my power to help and assist, whether it means stepping up or stepping down, because this is not about me. It’s about justice. This is not me quitting; this is a continuum.”
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