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.

Source: New York Times July 11, 2021 14:03 UTC