Is the Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King actually the male version of Rachel Dolezal , or is he the victim of a conservative controversy attempting to discredit him? The allegations against Shaun King were first reported by ReNews-It and Breitbart , and they state, in part, that not only is King white, as opposed to the biracial that he’s always claimed, but that he also lied about his race in order to be granted an Oprah Winfrey scholarship to Morehouse College, as well as having made up a story about being the victim of a brutal, racially-motivated attack when he was in high school.
In a series of tweets posted on Wednesday, King attempted to dispel the rumors accusing him of being white. “First off,” he said, “the key facts about my biological relatives are all wrong. They tried, but my family, like many of yours, is one big mess.” He went on to say that he did not concoct lies to get into Morehouse College, or to be granted an Oprah scholarship. One of Shaun’s tweets even compared what is being done to him to the conservatives demanding to see President Obama’s birth certificate.
Now, people who knew Shaun King in high school, and one of whom was a witness to the attack on the teenage King, are speaking out for the activist.
Willis Polk II — who, according to King, has been his best friend for 30 years — wrote a detailed Facebook post refuting the claims against Shaun, and confirming King’s accounts about what happened to him in high school. He also claimed a cover up on the part of the police department who handled Shaun’s case after he was beaten.
“Shaun King, my great friend of over 30 years, is under severe attack today. He is currently the number one trending topic in the world and everything his attackers are saying is a stone cold lie.
Not only was Shaun beaten to a bloody pulp by a mob of students while we were in high school, my city of Versailles did everything it could to cover up and down play the event from the moment that it happened, as evidenced by half-a**ed police report and lack of news coverage at the time of the event.”
Another schoolmate, Shea Gold, also took to Facebook to recount what he remembered happening to Shaun King when they were in high school.
“Shaun was quite literally ambushed by a large group of large people. He never saw what hit him. He never had a chance. I didn’t stop to count how many attacked him, but the number was easily in the neighborhood of a dozen. They were big white farm boys, all members of the FFA [Future Farmers of America]. Immediately a crowd formed while they stomped the life right out of Shaun, who couldn’t have weighed much more than 100 pounds, if at all.”
Links to the two Facebook posts, in their entireties, can be found on Shaun King’s Twitter account .
What do you think about the Shaun King controversy? Does it really matter what race he is, considering everything the activist has done for the Black Lives Matter movement? Sound off below.
[Image Credit: Shaun King / Facebook]