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 Spokane chapter of the NAACP Monday — insisted that she lost out on teaching opportunities and scholarship money because of her white skin, according to court documents.
“Moore claimed discrimination based on race, pregnancy, family responsibilities and gender, as well as retaliation,” reads a Court of Appeals opinion from 2005.
Dolezal, 37, at the time using her married name of Rachel Moore, filed the suit in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court in 2002, the same year she graduated with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Howard University, a historically black college.
The lawsuit alleged she was denied a teaching assistant gig, a post-graduate 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 African-American students over Moore,” read the court documents, first revealed by the website The Smoking Gun.
The case was tossed in 2004, after the court found no evidence she’d ever been discriminated against.
After the suit was thrown out and an appeals court affirmed the decision, Dolezal was ordered to fork over nearly $3,000 to the university for legal costs.
As a graduate student, she incorporated black subjects in her artwork — but professors said it was always very clear she was a white student.
“She was a blue-eyed blond woman,” David Smedley, her Howard thesis advisor, told the Washington Post.
In around 2007 she began posing as a black woman, telling some people her father was black, even though she was born white, her parents revealed last Friday. their revelations came as Spokane officials were probing whether she lied about her ethnicity in an application to sit on a police oversight committee.
Her parents have said she is of Czech, Swedish and German stock.
“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 — never directly addressing the issue of her race.
Her parents, Ruth and Lawrence Dolezal, blasted their daughter as being 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.”
“It is our hope and prayer that Rachel will take the steps necessary to acknowledge her dishonesty and to offer an apology to the NAACP and other organizations with which she held positions of prominence,” they wrote in a statement.
Dolezal is no longer employed by Eastern Washington University, where she held a part-time teaching position in the Africana Studies Department, according to the school’s spokesperson David Meany. Her quarterly contract ended “as scheduled” on June 12, he said.
Meanwhile, Dolezal’s artwork is also sparking controversy, with accusations that at least one of her paintings bearing an uncanny resemblance to a famous landscape by the artist J.M.W. Turner.
“Rachel Dolezal plagiarized a painting that has its own damn wikipedia article,” one stunned Twitter user wrote.
Added another: “Ballsy. Rachel Dolezal didn’t just plagiarize from any old artist, but from the highly recognizable TURNER!”
Dolezal is scheduled to speak to NBC News and MSNBC on Tuesday.
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