User:Daltob/Marie Bolden

Marie Chavous Bolden (June 25, 1894 – August 23, 1981) was the individual champion of the 1908 National Education Association Spelling Bee, the first national spelling bee in the United States.

Since Marie Bolden was Black, her spelling bee win challenged the idea of white supremacy in the United States. Black communities across the country celebrated her achievement, but many white Southerners saw it as an affront and demanded that future contests be segregated by race.

Early life
Marie Bolden was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1894. She was the oldest child of John Bolden and Belle Bolden (née Chew) and grew up with three younger brothers. Her father was a mail clerk who had emigrated from Canada, and her mother was born and raised in Cleveland.

Spelling bee championship
As part of the National Education Association's forty-sixth annual convention held in Cleveland, local school leaders promoted a first-of-its-kind national spelling bee competition to be held on June 29, 1908. Organizers invited teams of eighth-grade students to participate from cities across the country, with selection criteria left up to each participating school district. Within Cleveland, schools held spelling competitions to find the top candidates for the team. Marie Bolden was not the strongest speller to qualify, but school officials determined she was one of the fifteen best spellers in the school district and invited her to join the team.

To get ready for the spelling bee, Bolden practiced spelling every day leading up to the competition. Her father helped her prepare by asking the spellings of words from the dictionary and the newspaper, and she enlisted her friends to help quiz her as well.

In 1908, Cleveland's schools were racially integrated, but schools in other areas, particularly the South, were segregated by race. The spelling team from New Orleans was white-only. When school officials from New Orleans realized that Marie Bolden was part of Cleveland's spelling team, they demanded that she be replaced, so that their spellers would not have to compete against her.

Later life
Marie Bolden graduated from East High School in 1912 and was selected by faculty as a speaker for the school's commencement exercises. She attended Cleveland City Normal School (later merged into Case Western Reserve University ) for two years, graduated in spring 1914, and became a teacher. In 1917, she married Clarence Brown, another Cleveland native, and adopted his last name. They raised three children together. After World War II, the family moved to Burlington, Ontario, and she passed away there in 1981, at the age of 87.