Spelling Bee – Congratulations Zaila Avant-garde & Others
By
John C Abercrombie
We were greeted with headlines that Zaila Avant-garde had won the Scripps Spelling Bee, becoming the first African American to win the coveted award! As we congratulate Zaila o a job well done we peek behind the screen to see the full story.
There is no doubt that her accomplishment is worthy of praise. The candidates are given a list of 100,000 words and it is more than just putting letters together to spell a word. It is necessary to understand the meaning of the word, its language of origin and how it is being used to make sure that you are indeed spelling the correct word.
July 2021 Avant-garde won the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Becoming the first African American to win. Spelling the word murraya, which is a type of tropical tree. Besting a field of 208 other competitors.
Not to take any credit from her, she became the 2nd Black winner, or did she?
Before we look at this, we take a look at the Guinness Book of World Records to find the 14 year old listed as below:
- The most bounces of 4 basketballs in 30 seconds with 307. This record was set in New Orleans, Louisiana November 14, 2019
- The most basketballs dribbled at one time, when she dribbled 6. This record was set in Westwego, Louisiana January 26, 2021
- The most bounce juggles using 4 basketballs in 1minute when she got 255. This record was set in Baton Rouge, Louisiana November 2, 2020
Note that she also held the record for the most bounce juggles using 3 basketballs with 231, but that record was surpassed by Hungarian Tamás Felföldi, August 2020 who completed 233.
As we write history, we often play word games. We also unite or split racial groups, splitting to avoid giving credit and combining when it comes to negatives. As such, let’s look at the 1998 Scripps National Spelling Bee won by Jody-Ae Maxwell from Kingston, Jamaica. This amazing accomplishment made her the first Black and the first non-American to win. This gave her great fame in Jamaican communities in America.
Jody-Anne Maxwell qualified for the Scripps National Spelling Bee by winning the Jamaican National Spelling Bee. Please note that her sister won in 1990.
Many of the peoples of the Caribbean were slaves enslaved from the same countries as American slaves, so there is great kinship in the Africa diaspora.
While this is more proof of the ability to compete at the highest levels, the story is not over. We continue.
In 1936 MacNolia Cox then 13 years old made it to the final of the National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC becoming the first African American into the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Remember the contestants are given a list of 100,000 words? The judges, all southerners kept her from winning by giving her a word that was not on the list and was just being introduced into use. The word was ‘nemesis” meaning the inescapable agent of someone’s or something’s downfall.
At the final round, all of the contestants had misspelled a word or spelled it using an alternate spelling but were allowed to remain in the contest. The only person who had not missed a word? MacNolia Cox.
This also gives us a chance to see the actual hardship of being Black. When the train passed the Mason-Dixon line. The Mason Dixon line which separated the North from the South, passengers crossing the line into the South were forced off the train and made to sit in the “Colored” cars which were in fact sub-standard to the White cars. In some places the blinds were also pulled down. Rest rooms were not frequently cleaned, and the list goes on.
Cox couldn’t stay in the same hotel as the other contestants because of the color of her skin. She was forced to stay in a safe house. At the competition she can’t go through the front door and had to use the back door for the same reason, the color of her skin.
At a banquet for the spellers, she was not allowed to use the elevator and had to use the back stairwell and sit at a designated table segregated from the other contestants. At the competition, she was also segregated from the other contestants and not allowed to sit with them.
Today the conditions under which she had to endure to compete may seem harsh, but this is the way Blacks were treated in America!
In 1908, Marie C Bolden was the only competitor to not miss a single word and with this victory set off a firestorm of racial animus.
When New Orleans learned that the team from Cleveland included Bolden, they threatened to leave the competition when the superintendent of the Cleveland schools would not remove Bolden from the team.
510 children were given a 100 word written spelling test. At end Marie Bolden was declared the winner, spelling all words correctly, the only one to do so. Her Cleveland team was declared the winner having missed an average of 3 words, Pittsburgh was second missing an average of 4 words and New Orleans 3rd missing an average of 5 words.
Marie’s story upset the stereotype of what Blacks could accomplish.
The Seattle Republican newspaper reported that repercussions were serious in New Orleans and the superintendent of schools was censured for allowing the team to even participate against a Black contestant.
A group of Black educators in New Orleans wanted to honor Bolden and the mayor of New Orleans withheld the permit on the grounds ‘it might prove an incentive to a race riot with consequences dreadful to New Orleans’ accounting to a Mitchell, South Dakota newspaper.
The New Orleans Picayune attributed the loss as “too far away from home, in a strange land to them,” with a large crowd in attendance.
Although Marie C Bolden was declared the winner, this was 17 years before it became the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
While we see the difficulties in the wording of Avant-garde’s accomplishment, we also see the view of America that prevented the competition of Blacks for fear that it would destroy the stereotype. Keep in mind that there were laws on the books that prevented any competition between the races and fuels speculation that this was an effort to avoid destroying the stereotype.
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Zaila Avant-garde:
Spelling Bee Champ and Basketball Star Harvey native Zaila Avant-Garde is showing off her talent both on the court and on the stage of the National Spelling Bee in Florida.
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Biographies and Memoirs
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16 Jamaican WOMEN who created HISTORY
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Education and Teaching
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Remembering the 1936 National Spelling Bee
and how hatred eliminated a bright young girl from Akron Back in 1936, just 11 years after the National Spelling Bee was inaugurated, 13-year-old MacNolia Cox from Akron was a spelling prodigy with an IQ through the roof.
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Comics and Graphic Novels
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M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A:
“Jordan is a wizard at capturing vernacular in both conventional forms and his own invention.” –Black Issues Book Review In 1936, teenager MacNolia Cox became the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. Supposedly prevented from winning, the precocious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor was changed irrevocably. Her story, told in a poignant nonlinear narrative, illustrates the power of a pivotal moment in a life.
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Beeline
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Computers, Tablets and Components
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Behind Zaila Avant garde’s Win
a History of Struggle for Black Spellers Before Zaila became the first Black American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, other Black students faced decades of discrimination and doubts about their abilities. In 1936, MacNolia Cox, a 13-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio, made it to the final round of the National Spelling Bee. She was the first Black student to get that far, but she was forced to sit in the back of the train that took her to Washington, she and her mother were not allowed to eat with the other spellers or their parents, and they had to take the stairs, instead of an elevator, to get to a pre-contest banquet, Mabel Norris, a reporter who wrote about MacNolia’s trip to the bee, recalled in a 1971 article she wrote in The Akron Beacon Journal. Still, MacNolia, an eighth grader, bested dozens of other competitors in the final competition and was one of the last five spellers left on the stage. “The judges, all Southern educators, were becoming visibly uncomfortable,” Ms. Norris wrote. They gave her the word “Nemesis.” MacNolia, who did not recognize it from the list of 100,000 words she had studied, misspelled it. Ms. Norris immediately protested to the judges — Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution and revenge, was technically a proper noun and not an eligible word. But it was too late. MacNolia was out. “She didn’t cry, nor did her stoic mother,” Ms. Norris wrote. “But her teacher and chaperone did. “Eight and a half decades later, Zaila Avant-garde, a 14-year-old eighth grader from Harvey, La., has become the first Black American student to win the competition, an achievement that has been celebrated by former President Barack Obama and LeBron James. (The first Black winner was Jody-Anne Maxwell, a 12-year-old from Jamaica, who won the National Spelling Bee in 1998.)Zeila’s victory has also prompted reflection on the long history of struggle that other Black students who compete in spelling bees have faced. “The national bee started in 1925, at the heart of Jim Crow laws that were not even being challenged yet,” said Shalini Shankar, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University and the author of “Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success. “In 1962, the N. A. A. C. P. complained to the National Spelling Bee that school officials in Lynchburg, Va., had told Black students they could not participate in the national contest. The national contest, now known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee, did not exclude Black children, but it is easy to surmise that they would have been left out at the regional level, Professor Shankar said. If a region had a Black winner and a white winner from segregated schools, she said, it is likely that a corporate sponsor would have chosen to pay for the white winner’s transportation, lodgings and fees and left the Black child on the sidelines. Even after schools were desegregated, schools whose students were largely Black or Latino remained underfunded, Professor Shankar said.
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Toys and Games
For every age, these are designed not only for fun, but problem solving and igniting the love of learning.
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Beeline:
What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success An anthropologist uses spelling bees as a lens to examine the unique and diverse traits of Generation Z–and why they are destined for success At first glance, Generation Z (youth born after 1997) seems to be made up of anxious overachievers, hounded by Tiger Moms and constantly tracked on social media. One would think that competitors in the National Spelling Bee — the most popular brain sport in America — would be the worst off. Counterintuitively, anthropologist Shalini Shankar argues that, far from being simply overstressed and overscheduled, Gen Z spelling bee competitors are learning crucial twenty-first-century skills from their high-powered lives, displaying a sophisticated understanding of self-promotion, self-direction, and social mobility. Drawing on original ethnographic research, including interviews with participants, judges, and parents, Shankar examines the outsize impact of immigrant parents and explains why Gen Z kids are on a path to success.
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America should take pride in the accomplishments of Zaila Avant-garde not just Blacks. She is the future of us all. However in the story we see the horrors of being Black in America.
When one benefits, we all benefit. It is now time for us to take an honest look at ourselves and resolve those things that limit us all.