The winning word of Murraya...

I hope folks are staying cool (in the US!) and warm (in Zambia!). Last week, Zaila Avant-garde became the first African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in its 100-year history.

If you haven’t seen the video, I found the celebratory twirling and confetti to be completely contagious.

Zaila is by all accounts, all metrics, and all juries, remarkable at the age of just 14. She is a recent arrival to the spelling bee scene, competing in her first tournament just two years ago. She also holds three Guinness world records – for most basketballs dribbled at the same time, the most basketball bounces in a minute, and the most bounce juggles in a minute. She aspires to become an archeologist and play for the WNBA. Her dad realized her talent for spelling four years ago, when he had been watching the spelling bee and asked her how to spell the winning word. She breezed through it and proceeded to spell every winning word going back two decades.

And yet, her win is a reminder – even to her – that there is an inequity in how families can train, compete, and succeed in spelling bees, that largely come down to access to resources. Learning more about Zaila, you can’t help but learn more about MacNolia Cox – a 13 year-old Black girl who competed in the spelling bee way back in 1936. Cox advanced through the national finals and judges grew uncomfortable with her success. She ended up being eliminated by misspelling a word that should never have been given to her because it violated the contest rules. Thirty years before MacNolia Cox there was Marie Bolden – a 14-year-old Black girl who participated in the national spelling bee with the Cleveland team (back then the bee was organized around city teams). She earned a perfect score and the highest on the Cleveland team which ultimately placed first. Later, Bolden was stripped of her title because a proctor had given the wrong definition of a word during the competition.

In the history we are taught and we learn on our own, we often think about the heroes of the civil rights movement that desegregated large institutions – Ruby Bridges / Linda Brown, Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, the college students at the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter. But, in truth, there have been countless Black heroes who played a role in the civil rights movement and whose names have gone by unrecognized. So many Black students who showed up at traditionally all-white schools, Black athletes who were the first at their baseball field, and Black women who didn’t think they should have to give up their seat.

Among these heroes, there are also two Black teenagers who succeeded in all-white spelling bees through excellence, grit, and courage in the face of terrible discrimination. Today, we honor them, and we celebrate Zaila Avant-garde’s historic win.

-Reshma