A US civil rights activist who resigned from her post at the country's leading African American advocacy group amid allegations that she has pretended to be black said Tuesday she identifies as an African American.

A firestorm erupted last week around Rachel Dolezal -- who was president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- after her parents, who are white, said she is too.

"I identify as black," an unapologetic Dolezal told NBC's "Today" show, in her first interview since her story made national headlines.

She said that by age five, she was already "drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of peach. Black curly hair."

"It's a little more complex than me identifying as black or answering a question of 'are you black or white?'" she told NBC.

Dolezal, 37, built a career as an activist in the black community of Spokane.

She rose to become the president of the city's branch of the NAACP and served as an independent mediator for the city's police force.

Neither position required that she be black, but media reports said Dolezal identified herself in application forms and in various public appearances and writings as at least partially black.

She resigned Monday from her NAACP post.

Dolezal's parents, from whom she is estranged, have provided local media with a birth certificate and photographs of her as a blonde, fair-skinned child.

Now, as an adult, she is tawny-skinned and dark-haired.

When asked if she had intentionally darkened her complexion, Dolezal said, "I certainly don't stay out of the sun."

But she bristled at the notion that she was putting on blackface, as some have suggested.

"This is not some freak 'Birth of a Nation" mockery blackface performance. This is on a very real connected level -- how I have actually had to go there with the experience," Dolezal said.

She called the storm of criticism around her "viciously inhumane" and said she would make the same choices if she had to do it all over again.

"The discussion is really about what it is to be human," Dolezal said, adding that she hoped the incident "really can drive at the core of definitions of race, ethnicity, culture, self-determination, personal agency and, ultimately, empowerment."

- Relating to diversity -

In an interview with Fox News, Dolezal's parents said their daughter had not shown signs of identifying as black from an early age.

"No, that is a fabrication, that's false," her mother Ruthanne said.

"Rachel is rejecting her biological family and she is also rejecting reality."
The Dolezals, who adopted four black children and said they had multiple black friends, conceded that their daughter "was used to relating to people of diversity" and had always been attracted to the black community.

Dolezal had been "assimilated into the black culture and the African American community now for 20 years," her father Larry said.

"All we can surmise is that somehow that identity has transferred from being part of a multi-ethnic family with our adopted children to somehow thinking she's herself multi-ethnic."

Her parents also weighed in on reports that Dolezal sued historically black Howard University in 2002 for racial discrimination because she was white.

"The way I recall it being reported back to us, when she walked in to finalize the registration a week or two before classes started, eyes were popping, jaws were dropping" her father said.

"They couldn't believe they had awarded a full-ride scholarship to a white woman."

Since the controversy erupted around Dolezal, she had dodged questions seeking clarification about her race and ethnicity, and she did not address her race in her NAACP resignation letter.

Leaders from the city of Spokane said in a statement they were "disappointed" over the episode and "the alleged misrepresentation."