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PICTURED: Verda Byrd (Image: KENS 5/YouTube)

A WOMAN spent 70 years believing she was black after she was adopted as a young child.

Verda Byrd, who is now 75, spent most of her life thinking she was African-American until she tracked down the identity of her biological family.

Born Jeanette Beagle, she was adopted by a black couple, Ray and Edwinna Wagner, after her father left the family home and her mother was severely injured after a fall and authorities took the pair’s 10 children into care.

Despite her complexion, Byrd assumed she was light-skinned because of her parents’ ethnicity.

It wasn’t until 2013 that Byrd’s mother Edwinna told her that she was adopted. However, Edwinna did not provide details about the identity of Byrd’s biological parents.

‘My adoptive mother, Edwinna Wagner, never told me that she had adopted a white baby,’ The Daily Mail reported Byrd said.

After her mother’s revelation, Byrd began a search for her biological parents and discovered that they were in fact white.

‘I grew up not questioning birth or anything else because it was never told to me that I was born white,’ Byrd said.

Byrd’s unusual story inspired her to write an autobiography, Seventy Years of Blackness, which she released in 2017.

She decided to go public with her story around the same time that Rachel Dolezal was dominating headlines.

Dolezal, a former NAACP leader, successfully pretended to be black for years until her true identity was unveiled in 2015.

The parents of the 41-year-old mother-of-two, who are both white, revealed that their daughter, who legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, was posing as a black woman during an interview with reporters.

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