Verda Byrd: White Woman Who Spent 70 Years Thinking She Was Black Calls Rachel Dolezal A Liar

Verda Byrd spent seven decades living with black parents believing that she was black herself, but she found out at age 70 that her biological parents were both white.

Now Byrd is speaking out against Rachel Dolezal, the disgraced former NAACP leader who had been living as a black woman.

Byrd, who was put up for adoption as a young child and raised by a black family, said she is nothing like Dolezal, who intentionally misled people about her race.

“She lied about her race,” Byrd told KHOU. “I didn’t lie about my race because I didn’t know.”

Rachel Dolezal would later say she identifies as transracial, taking on a black identity despite her white background. She has called out both black and white critics, saying they don’t know about her life or her experiences.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, she said (via Real Clear Politics), “But those — they don’t know me. They really don’t know what I’ve actually walked through and how hard it is. This has not been something that just is a casual, you know, come and go sort of identity, you know, or an identity crisis or something to fade away. People have asked like, so, are you going to go back to being white? If you’re rejected by the black community, what do you do? I’ll be me. I’ll be me.”

Verda Byrd has quite a different story. She was born Jeanette Beagle, the daughter of white transients. After her father left the family and her mother was injured in a bad fall, she was put up for adoption and joined a wealthy black family from Kansas.

She was raised as a light-skinned black child and grew up believing she was truly black.

“My adoptive mother, Edwinna Wagner, never told me that she had adopted a white baby,” Byrd told news station KHOU. “She took it to her grave that she had a white daughter.”

Verda Byrd said she only found out that she was really black after finally tracking down her birth parents and finding that both they — and her siblings — were white.

“Jeanette Beagle does not fit Verda Byrd,” she said. “Jeanette Beagle does not have an education. Jeanette Beagle has no social security money because she does not work. She never went to kindergarten.”

Since then Verda Byrd has re-connected with her white siblings but said she still identifies as a black person — and does not sympathize with Rachel Dolezal.

[Image via ABC News]