Ferguson michael brown
Black Lives Matter demonstrators march peacefully through St Louis 23 November 2014 Jewel Samad/AFP

Two months after Rachel Dolezal, the leader of a prominent civil rights group in Washington State, was revealed to be a white woman posing as a black person, a Black Lives Matter campaigner has been being accused of doing the same.

Activist Shaun King, who has written about and raised money for the Black Lives Matter campaign, was accused on 19 August by conservative website Breitbart of not actually being mixed race.

King identifies himself as mixed race and attended Morehouse College, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr earned a degree in 1948. Shaun King attended the predominantly black Georgia college as a Morehouse Oprah Scholar, a scholarship funded by billionaire talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Brietbart levels the accusation that since the scholarship is for black men only, King misrepresented himself to get funding.

Birth certificates and photos of his family members visually support the core argument of the piece, that King is not black. Evidence collected by blogger Vicki Pate, who has been accused of stalking and racism in other cases, corroborates information found on King's birth certificate, which lists Naomi Kay Fleming and Jeffery Wayne King as his mother and father.

Some on social media collated photos of the family. However, King defended himself and his racial identity, stating: "The key facts about my biological relatives are all wrong. No [two] siblings in my family have the same set of parents. We're all over the place. Some of us are not even blood relatives."

Brietbart also questions the accuracy of King's story that he was brutally beaten in high school by a gang of white students. King posted a message about the beating refuting the claims on Facebook. "Sadly, several popular conservative websites are saying I made the whole thing up in an attempt to discredit my work to end police brutality in our country," King wrote on Facebook. Underneath his post a witness to the attack named Shea Gold relates the story and says the attack was made by "big white farm boys."

Yet others in the black community question not only King's race but his past campaigning activities, which have raised money that some say was never delivered to the causes it was meant to support.

He operated a campaign to raise money for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. It raised $540,000 but the charity set to receive the funds reported that only $200,000 was delivered. King is currently working on a new project called Justice Together, which he says is "building a 50 state coalition against police brutality".

The Black Lives Matter campaign has been instrumental in the past year to campaign against police brutality against black Americans, who are disproportionally represented in the country's jails. The campaign was started after the death of Michael Brown in August 2014 who was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri, sparking riots. Several other black deaths in police custody across the country have pushed the campaign forward.

However, questions about race and authenticity have come to the fore after Dolezal, until recently the president of the Spokane branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was revealed as a white woman on 12 June.

For now, King said, he's "not going to stop doing what I do, being who I am, or fighting the fights that I fight to end police brutality".

More about Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter