Members of her family believe that the turning point came when she won a scholarship to take a master’s degree in fine art at the largely black Howard University in Washington DC. They recall how she had submitted a portfolio of portraits of African-Americans, and people at the university — especially staff — were resentful when they discovered she wasn’t black as they had assumed.
Her brother Ezra says Miss Dolezal — still with a pale complexion and straight blonde hair — complained to her family of suffering racism.
She developed a ‘dislike for being white, and for white people’ that boiled down to ‘self-hatred’, he believes.
After university, she had a short-lived marriage to an African-American man which produced a son but ended, she claims, because her husband became violent to her and to the child.
