Rachel Dolezal biography: 13 things about Troy, Montana native

Who is Rachel Dolezal?

Rachel Anne Dolezal is an American woman of Czech, German and Swedish descent. She is a white woman who self-identifies as African-American.

Dolezal was born in Troy, Lincoln County, Montana, United States to her German-Czech father Lawrence “Larry” A. Dolezal and her German-Swedish mother Ruthanne Schertel Dolezal. Larry and Ruthanne raised Rachel in the Pentecostal faith.

In 1974, Larry and Ruthanne briefly lived in a tipi. In September 1975, she gave birth to Joshua Andrew Doležal in Troy.

When Rachel was a teenager, Larry and Ruthanne adopted three African-American children namely Zachariah Dolezal, Ezra Dolezal and Izaiah Dolezal and one Haitian child. From 2002 to 2006, Larry, Ruthanne and their adopted children moved to South Africa where they served as Christian missionaries.

To look like an African-American woman, Rachel darkens her skin and perms her hair. Here are 13 more things about her:

1. Homeschooled via the Christian Liberty Academy CLASS program, she was one of the co-valedictorians when she graduated in 1996.
2. In 1996, Tandy Leather awarded her $2,000 scholarship for college for her entry in the Leather Art contest.
3. In 1998, she expressed African-American themes through collages and mixed-media works, which she entered at the annual Juneteenth celebration in Spokane, Washington, USA.
4. In 2000, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. In the same year, she married Kevin Moore, an African-American medical student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., USA.
5. In 2002, she gave birth to Franklin Doležal Moore, she graduated summa cum laude from Howard University with a master’s degree in fine arts and sued the university for discrimination.
6. In 2004, Kevin divorced her and Judge Zoe Bush dismissed the complaint she filed against Howard University in 2002.
7. In 2007, she started to adopt her African-American identity, became estranged from her parents and worked at School Indigo in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA as an art teacher.
8. In 2008, she became the education director of the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene.
9. From 2009 to 2015, she claimed several times that she was a victim of race-related harassment but all of her allegations resulted neither in an arrest nor in the filing of criminal charges.
10. In 2010, Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington hired her as an instructor in the Africana Education program on a quarter by quarter basis. That year, she asked the Human Rights Education Institute’s board of directors to name her executive director and submitted her letter of resignation contingent on the board refusing her promotion. The board accepted her resignation and appointed its new development director Dan Lepow as executive director. It was “a forced resignation,” The Spokesman-Review quoted her as saying.
11. In 2014, she was elected president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter in Spokane. 
12. Between August 2015 and December 2017, she received $8,847 in food and childcare assistance while receiving tens of thousands of dollars in unreported income. 
13. On November 12, 2024, she turned 47.

TIMELINE

2015

• In February 2015, she claimed in an interview with The Easterner that while she was attended Howard University, a trusted mentor sexually assaulted her but suing was almost impossible because of the amount of wealth the man had.
• On June 10, 2015, KXLY-TV reporter Jeff Humphrey asked her about Albert Wilkerson, an African-American man she publicly identified as her father, and whether or not she is really African-American. She refused to answer.
• On June 15, 2015, Eastern Washington University announced that she was no longer its employee and she resigned from the NAACP.
• On November 2, 2015, she appeared on “The Real” where she acknowledged for the first time that she was “biologically born white to white parents” but explained that she identified as black.

2016

• On February 16, 2016, she gave birth to Langston Attickus Dolezal. She did not reveal the identity of the child’s father. The boy was named after African-American poet, author and social activist Langston Hughes and African-American-Native American stevedore Crispus Attucks, the first American killed in the American Revolution.

2017

• In March 2017, BenBella Books published her memoir “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World,” which she co-wrote with Storms Reback.
• In an interview with The Stranger writer Ijeoma Oluo in April 2017, she said multiple times that black people have rejected her because they simply have not learned yet that race is a social construct created by white supremacists.
• On October 7, 2017, a judge granted her request to change her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, which means “gift of God” and “bold” in the Igbo language, which is spoken primarily in Nigeria.

2018

• A documentary about her life titled “The Rachel Divide” was screened at Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, New York, USA on April 23, 2018 and released on Netflix on April 27, 2018.
• In May 2018, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services charged her with second-degree perjury and felony theft by welfare fraud.

2019

• On March 25, 2019, she entered into a diversion agreement in Spokane County Superior Court. She agreed to repay her assistance benefits and complete 120 hours of community service to avoid a trial.

2020

• In an interview with the New York Post in July 2020, she revealed that the Black Lives Matter movement in Spokane declined her offer to get involved.

2021

• Published on February 15, 2021, Mithu Sanyal‘s novel “Identiti” is about Nivedita Anand, a character modeled after her.

2022

• In October 2022, the audience of the Channel 4 show “Jimmy Carr Destroys Art” voted to have Jimmy Carr destroy her sculpture “Misaligned Mind” over John Leach‘s cartoon “Dis-united States”.

2023

• On March 17, 2023, she went to the Executive Towers in Phoenix, Arizona, USA where 24th Arizona governor Katie Hobbs signed an executive order banning racial discrimination based on a person’s hair in Arizona.
• In August 2023, the Catalina Foothills Unified School District in Tucson, Arizona hired her as a teacher.

2024

• On February 14, 2024, the Catalina Foothills Unified School District fired her after discovering her nude and explicit images on her OnlyFans account.

2025

• On February 3, 2025, she took to Instagram to share a photo of herself with a caption, “It’s a beautiful day to get a colonoscopy.”