Zaila Avant-Garde | Spelling Bee Super Champion
Fourteen-year-old Zaila Avant-Garde captured the attention of the world when she became the first Black student in the United States to win the National Spelling Bee championship. At 12 years of age, Jamaican Jody-Ann Maxwell, now a lawyer in Illinois, was the first Black student to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1998.
Not only is Avant-garde a champion speller who correctly spelled the word “myrraya” to walk away with the top prize and the yearlong championship, but she is also a juggler, a unicyclist, and a basketball player who can multi-task skillfully by spelling, juggling, and cycling all at the same time. Zaila‘s win came with $50,000 in cash and prizes, and according to this brilliant eighth-grader, spelling is like a “side hustle”. She is the holder of three basketball Guinness World Records and co-holder of a fourth. “Basketball, I’m not just playing it … I am trying to go somewhere with this. Basketball is what I do,” she explained. “Spelling is really a side thing. It’s like a little hors d’eouvre. Basketball is the main dish.”
There is more … Avant-Garde is a medalist and the 2020 champion in the Juniors Division with the International Juggler’s Association. She is also an elite unicyclist.
Her spelling bee coach Cole Shafer-Ray said of Zaila, “Most spellers look at words simply as a sequence of letters to memorize. Zaila looks at each word as a story. Not only did she know each word’s spelling, she also knows its entire backstory, its historical context, what roots it came from, and the precise orthographical logic of why every letter of every word had to e exactly what it is.”
Noteworthy is the fact that a 13-year-old Black girl named MacNolia Cox from Akron, Ohio, came close to winning the 12th National Spelling Bee in 1936. Traveling to the contest, MacNolia and her mother had to move to the Blacks-only car once the train crossed into Maryland and they were not allowed to stay at Willard Hotel with the other spellers. They were also placed at a separate table by themselves at the contestants’ banquet. With only 5 competitors remaining, the judges asked MacNolia to spell “nemesis”. At the time, “Nemesis,” the name of the goddess of revenge, was capitalized in the dictionary, and capitalized words were barred from the competition. Miss Cox misspelled the word and was knocked out of the competition. It is the belief that Cox was intentionally given an unapproved word because of her race.
