Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP chapter president who was accused of pretending to be black, said Monday that she would step down.
“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,” she wrote in a Facebook post.
Dolezal has identified herself on official documents as partly black. Her parents told reporters last week that she is “Caucasian by birth,” with Czech, Swedish, German and a trace of Native American ancestry.
In addition to the job at the NAACP, Dolezal, 37, is the chairwoman of Spokane’s Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, a volunteer appointment. On the application for the job, she identified as white, black, and American Indian.
Dolezal’s parents appeared on NBC’s Today on Monday morning before their daughter announced her resignation on Facebook.
They say they’ve been estranged from their daughter for years and believe she made up her background as a way to hurt them.
“I think Rachel has tried to damage her biological family and those kind of claims, as false as they were, seem to serve her purposes in her mind,” her mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, said.
Rachel Dolezal, 37, who was the leader of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, has also said she was born in a teepee and grew up hunting for food with a bow and arrow.
Both parents insist they never sought out publicity or raised red flags about their daughter. Instead, they said they were approached less than a week ago by a newspaper, the Coeur d’Alene Press, assumedly as “part of some investigative reporting,” Lawrence Dolezal said.
“Somehow, they got wind of us as her parents as a possibility and so they contacted us to see if we were in fact her parents,” he said. “We taught our children, as we raised all 6 of them, ‘Tell the truth. Always be honest.’ So we weren’t going to lie, we told the truth. Rachel is our birth daughter.”
Dolezal’s Montana birth certificate states she was born to Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, who say they are white.
“We’re puzzled,” Lawrence Dolezal said when asked why his daughter lied about her background. His wife suggested their daughter, who is also a professor in the Africana Education Department at Eastern Washington University, may have wanted to boost her credentials as a black activist and educator.
Rachel Dolezal was scheduled to address the uproar at a NAACP chapter meeting Monday night but the meeting was postponed over the weekend.
The couple also denied charges they were abusive parents calling the claims a “dramatic change” to what they knew when Rachel was growing up and always wanting to introduce them to her friends.
“We still hold out hope that we’ll be able to be reconciled someday,” Lawrence Dolezal said.
His wife added: “And we hope that Rachel will get the help that she needs to deal with her identity issues. Of course we love her, and we hope that she will come to a place where she knows and believes and speaks the truth.”
Information from NBC News and Today.com was included in this report.
