Word: silver
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This anecdote is what James W. Silver's book is all about. Silver, a history professor at the University of Mississippi, witnessed the riots there when James Meredith was admitted in 1962. Horrified, he decided to present the facts about the event and to place it in historical perspective. The result was an address before the Southern Historical Association, of which he was outgoing president, and--much expanded--Mississippi: The Closed Society...
...thesis, evident from the title, is that Mississippi has become a closed society with an orthodoxy accepted by nearly all the citizens--at least, the white citizens--of the state. Mississippi's institutions, Silver maintains, cooperate in enforcing the official doctrine of white supremacy. Non-conformists are silenced or expelled from the community...
Certainly, Silver's book is valuable for its description of the forces which stifle dissent in Mississippi. Its fault is what it leaves out. Mississippi: The Closed Society is all detail and no substance: Silver introduces his thesis, presents an overwhelming mass of examples to back it up, but never explains...
Although himself a historian Professor Silver fails to discuss adequately the historical forces which produced the closed society. He points out that a political convention called in 1851 to consider secession hooted at "the asserted right of secession" as "utterly unsanctioned by the Constitution." Yet in 1861, Mississippi was the second state to secede. Silver never mentions the reason for this about-face: namely, the passage of political power in just ten years from the small farmers to the rich Delta plantation owners, whose interests have controlled the state ever since...
...Silver also fails to emphasize sufficiently the relation between Mississippi's oppressive social system and its economic ills, which make it the poorest state in the country. He does not treat, for example, the problems of the increasing mechanization of agriculture in an area with no cities to offer employment to the growing mass of jobless sharecroppers, most of whom are Negroes...