Watching Eyes on the Prize last night on PBS brought back memories.
A decade before the Selma march, I was a student at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), quietly going about my business while under surveillance by agents of the White Citizens Council and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. It was an interesting time.
In 1956, I worked with a group of students on an underground newspaper called the Nigble Papers. I was essentially the publisher, which mostly meant finding a mimeograph machine somewhere that wasn't under lock and key. It was much like what was known in the Soviet Union as samizdat.
Our paper was later reprinted under the title Southern Reposure by a small group of Mississippi citizens: P.D. East, editor and publisher of The Petal Paper of Petal, Mississippi (near Hattiesburg); Hodding Carter, editor and publisher of The Delta Democrat-Times of my then home town of Greenville, Mississippi; Professor James Silver of Ole Miss (one of my history professors); and William Faulkner.
I recently came across a reference to the event in P.D. East's memoirs, The Magnolia Jungle, in a book of collected narratives by Marion Barnwell.
Our efforts didn't accomplish much in the short term, but I'd like to believe they helped in the long run.
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3 comments:
My late husband Jean Morrison was one of the authors of "The Nigble Papers." Don't have a copy anymore, it got lost in one of our moves, but I remember many parts of it.
Joelle Morrison
Jean Morrison, who came to Ole Miss after serving in the Marines, was a talented writer with a great ability to convey information in a succinct phrase. One I remember from the Nigble Papers (I have misplaced my copies also) was a brief review of a fictitious book:
"Democracy and the Southern Way of Life: A stunning, poignant essay on the difference between the two."
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