SpringfieldNewsSun.com

New ground is what William McClain sought to break in mid-February of 1934.

But when the Springfield native stood as the lone black participant in an Ohio colleges oratorical contest 75 years ago today, Feb. 16, he first had to break the ice.

So he turned to humor.

In front of the all-white audience at Muskingum College in New Concord, McClain, representing Wittenberg University, played on three black caricatures of the day: Black Sambo, a lazy bones and "a razor-toting Rastus."

He then distinguished himself from the black strawmen.

"I have no chicken under my coat, watermelon season has long passed; and I will not degenerate this assembly by starting a crap game," he said.

As his audience smiled, he leveraged those images to illustrate the challenge in front of him.

"When (a black person) assumes a cultural pose," McClain said, "he faces that American philosophy: 'N.... stay in your place; this is a white man's country.'"

At that, his audience sat upright, well aware of his speech's serious intention.

Now 96, McClain sprinkled the "n" word throughout the speech that earned him first a state, then a national oratorical title.

Each time, he said in an interview from his Cincinnati home, it carried the tone it had in the days of slavery and segregation.

The "n" word stood for an emphatic, emotional and often irrational dictate of a color line McClain was determined to cross.

"The day of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom and Amos 'n Andy is gone, never to return," he said early in the speech.

The bookend to that comment is one McClain spoke to himself after his triumph at the national oratorical contest at Northwestern University.

Anticipating by decades the "Yes, we can," of candidate Barack Obama's recent presidential campaign, McClain proclaimed, "Yes, I can."

"I knew as a black if I could win a contest coming from a background where my mother and my stepfather and my grandmother never had a high school education, I could do almost anything in the world," he said.

He went on to a distinguished legal career and achieved several firsts for blacks in the Cincinnati area, which led Wittenberg named its Black Cultural House for him.

That all started with the speech given 75 years ago today — the day after he stayed the night with Muskingum College's black college janitor.

Here are excerpts from McClain's winning speech, "Our Scroll of Destiny."

Parts of it remain surprisingly modern.

• "The history of mankind is a continued story of men and nations who did not know 'how to stay in their place.' When the world shook from its shoulders the torn garments of feudalism, when it garbed itself in the intellectual splendor of the Renaissance, and when it released from its scarred hands the manacles of slavery, it was essentially 'getting out of its place.'"

• "A Negro deplores segregation not because he desires the company of the whites, but because it has heaped down upon him an avalanche of cultural and economic disadvantages. If the doors of our colleges are to be slammed in his face, then let us push ajar the panels of his own institutions with adequate facilities and better opportunities, so that he may weld in his own foundries the scholar, statesman and teacher."

• "Lynching is America's frantic effort to keep inviolate the chastity of white womanhood. Yet ... if we really believe in chastity, it can only be the chastity of all womanhood .... Despite the so-called 'natural aversion' for blacks, five-sixths of the Negro race is amalgamated. This indicates not so much the immorality of the colored woman, but rather the risks and rigors of her lower social strata. No jingoistic newspapers with all the colorful devices of yellow journalism await to aggravate the deed; no mob champions her cause."

• "Are we to believe that liberty, equality and justice are attributes applying to a white skin only? Do the principles which the humble Jewish philosopher preached along the shores of Galilee; which Rousseau molded into his Social Contract; which motivated the barons at Runnymede, and which led our Pilgrim fathers to Plymouth Rock become unworkable, when yoked to a black man's skin?"

• "In the 18th century the world began to be color-conscious. Everything that embodied superiority, purity, beauty and honor was white. All that symbolized superstition, ignorance, inferiority and dishonor was black. Heaven was a pearly white city; hell was a black dismal pit."

• "How long will intelligent America tolerate this pernicious propaganda? Will we make whiteness the only fundamental tenet of our morality? Will the cardinal virtues of man — chastity, honesty, character and personality — be swept aside for mere color?"

• "If religion can not persuade men to live together whether they have kinky hair, pigtails, slant eyes or hook noses, then it has failed in its essential purpose. If education can not teach men to judge one another by the worth of character and the power of personality, and not by color, then it is valueless. If laws do not help men in their social relationships, then it would be better that chaos and anarchy reign."

• "I believe in a greater humanity that transcends race, color and creed. Therefore, I believe in the Black Man's Destiny — that somewhere, sometime in this land of ours ... he shall climb the mountains of life and emerge above the clouds of blackness into the sunlight of freedom and justice."

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.