In spring 1956, about 2,500 students—every last one white—attended the University of Mississippi. (At the time, the schools that would become Alcorn State, Jackson State, and Mississippi Valley State Universities were available to African-American students.) According to a poll conducted by the student newspaper at the time, fewer than a fifth of the students believed African Americans should be allowed to enroll in the state’s flagship university. Among this minority was a tall, bespectacled freshman named Jean Morrison. Though he had grown up in Chicago, Morrison’s family moved to Mississippi when he was a teenager. At 19, he joined the Marines and fought in Korea. He arrived on campus in fall 1955 to study philosophy, a 22-year-old progressive veteran, out of step with most of his classmates. “Believe me,” John Rosenthal, a photographer who knew Morrison, says, “he was nothing like the kids in Mississippi.”
Morrison could be outspoken, and he was itching to make a public statement on race. He decided to create a fictitious, satirical newspaper warning of the dangers of allowing the “Scotch-Irish” into proper society. Of course, many white Mississippians are of Scotch-Irish descent.
Morrison recruited a few like-minded students, including Sylvia Topp, a 20-year-old Canadian liberal arts major. Topp, a writer who lives in Ontario, says that she had “barely seen a black person,” before moving to Mississippi. But after arriving in Oxford, she says, “I instinctively knew things were wrong.” She saw “Whites Only” signs on campus and in town, and black people stepped off of sidewalks when she approached. “Every day there was a new shock for me,” she says.
Morrison wrote many of the fictitious news reports, columns, and letters to the editor that appeared in the paper, all of which advocated for keeping the Scotch-Irish segregated from society. Topp designed the six-page paper, and the university’s chaplain, Will D. Campbell, allowed the group to print it secretly on a mimeograph machine at his church. “We worked all night in the church basement,” Topp says, “then distributed copies on the cafeteria tables very early in the morning.”
When students entered the cafeteria for breakfast that morning in February 1956, they discovered copies of The Nigble Papers. (Morrison came up with the name by combining a racial slur with “Bible.”) A note on the first page from the paper’s “publisher” explained that a member of the “U.S.D.S. (United Sons and Daughters of Segregation)” had recently introduced him “to the full power of the Scotch-Irish menace and its desire to overthrow our present system.” Included was a story about a “young Scotch-Irish boy” charged with calling a white woman a “wee bonny lassie.” A district attorney was quoted in it, saying the trial “may very well cast the dye—either for keeping our blood pure or for monegrelizing [sic] with the Scotch-Irish.” A letter to the editor asked: “I do not believe God wants us to mix with the Scotch-Irish, else why did he put them off on a little island by themselves?”