Another Mississippi book that made a difference
The Help reminds us of the power of publishing to change things that need changing. In Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, I told the story of a Mississippi book that made a difference in that same time: historian James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society. – Carol Polsgrove, January 2012
Watching James Meredith live through his ordeal at the University of Mississippi in 1962 had changed James Silver profoundly. Because he openly supported Meredith, he endured phone calls in the night and harassment by politicians. He received threats of violence, and once someone sent his young daughter a doll with a pin stuck through its heart.
Born in the North but educated in the South, Silver had seen the South he thought he knew transformed before his very eyes. The cruelty behind the screen had emerged into public view. By the summer of 1963, three of Mississippi’s deadliest dramas had drawn national attention: the murder of Emmett Till, rioting at the University of Mississippi, and the assassination of Medgar Evers. There had been other deaths, too, and countless acts of brutality. By Silver’s reckoning, it was time for someone to call Mississippi to account.
He had a plan. He had accepted the vice presidency of the Southern Historical Association because as vice president he would become president, and as president he would deliver a presidential address in Asheville, N.C., in the fall of ’63. He meant to use the occasion to tell Mississippi the things he felt it needed to hear.
He stirred interest in the speech in the very way he prepared it. First he travelled Mississippi talking with community leaders. Then he sent letters out to professors and lawyers, along with a handful of businessmen and newspaper editors. Nearly half of those he wrote were historians. The majority were native Mississippians. His letter asked a simple question: What made Mississippians act as they did?
George B. Tindall of the University of North Carolina proposed a potpourri of explanations: the population was mostly rural, the white population was relatively homogeneous, educational standards were low. All these factors made Mississippi a place where “variety, knowledge of the outside world and different cultures and different ways of doing things, remain unknown.” Besides that, the state was poor, and unlike North Carolina and Georgia, had almost no middle-class liberals. The newspapers were “impossible.” The South was a patriarchy, with ties forged by family and clan, not by economic roles as in the “open modern society.”
Other answers flowed in, thirty-eight in all.
By the month before the Asheville meeting, Silver had written a 95-page pamphlet that the Southern Regional Council planned to publish and distribute throughout Mississippi. But a New York publisher – Harcourt, Brace & World – wanted Silver to write a book and asked Silver to refrain from publishing the pamphlet before the book came out.
Silver knew that what he had written was “going to be not only timely but enormously provocative,” and he didn’t think he should wait to publish it as a book. He put the question to the SRC’s Leslie Dunbar: “What is the best thing to do, for all of us, under the present complicated circumstances? I want this material, in whatever form, widely distributed in Mississippi, even if it is as a sort of last will and testament.”
Dunbar understood that a trade publisher could bring Mississippi: The Closed Society attention a pamphlet would never draw. He advised Silver to sign on for a book. Thus, before Silver ever gave his address in Asheville, the wheels were turning to deliver its message to a national audience. A reporter from Newsweek‘s Atlanta office knew what was coming and planned to be there. Silver himself had sent out advance copies of the speech, and arriving in Asheville, he went over it with the New York Times‘s Claude Sitton, pointing out the parts he thought were important.
By the time he began to speak, most in the audience had an idea of what he was going to say. They might not have known before they came, but once they arrived in Asheville, they heard what was coming soon enough. Silver himself was elated; all this attention was heady wine.
It was characteristic of Silver to begin, not on a solemn note, but with a protracted joke. “The Mississippian and the American should each stick to his own kind,” he said, to gales of laughter. “If the good Lord had intended Mississippians and Americans to live and work in the same way, he would not have created a Mississippi and an America in the first place.” Of course, he did not really feel that way, Silver said, ending the comic warm-up and getting down to the serious business of Mississippi’s “closed society.”
It was a masterful phrase. Countering the rhetoric of white resisters who portrayed the civil rights movement as a communist plot, Silver portrayed Mississippi itself as a totalitarian society.
“In committing itself to the defense of the bi-racial system, Mississippi has erected a totalitarian society….The more embattled the closed society becomes, the more monolithic, the more corrupt, and the more willing to engage in double-think and double talk.” But the Cold War spelled an end to Mississippi’s resistance to the national will. A nation fighting communism had to fulfill its democratic promise. “It will not much longer indulge the frustration of its will.”
The speech built powerfully to its conclusion, when Silver delivered his hardest blow, the last thing the white resistance wanted to hear: a call for federal intervention – “the massive aid of the country as a whole, backed by the power and authority of the federal government.” His audience rose in standing ovation. Of the hundreds there, only two or three had walked out.
The speech was not much reported in Mississippi, but Claude Sitton’s account appeared on the front page of the New York Times: “Mississippi Professor Declares That His State is ‘Totalitarian.’” The Associated Press distributed a story on Silver’s speech to newspapers and broadcast outlets across the country. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a long article headlined “Most Hated Man in Mississippi.” In the Saturday Evening Post, Ralph McGill referred to the speech as a “documented and damning indictment of thought control in that state.” Harcourt, Brace & World prepared to put Silver’s argument into book form.
And less than a month after the Asheville speech, the Mississippi Board of Trustees for Institutions of Higher Learning received a letter from the director of the state Sovereignty Commission suggesting that Silver’s comments on Mississippi, delivered outside state borders, constituted such disloyalty that he ought to be fired for them.
Toward the end of April, the trustees’ secretary wrote Silver asking him to respond under oath to fifteen questions. The goal, he thought, was to entrap him into saying something that the board could call perjury. Then the board could fire him for “contumacious conduct.”
The American Association of University Professors offered to pay for a Mississippi lawyer if Silver could find one brave enough to take a job. Silver did indeed find one, and once the trustees heard from him, they abandoned their efforts to bring Silver to heel.
Mississippi: The Closed Society was published in June 1964, just as three civil rights workers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner – were murdered in Mississippi. Their deaths brought the federal government into the state. FBI agents and navy men swarmed across the landscape around Philadelphia, Mississippi, searching for their bodies. The FBI set up an office in Jackson. After the bodies were found, the state refused to prosecute the men implicated in the murders. The federal government then brought charges in federal court. Seven defendants were convicted, among them the deputy sheriff.
Weary of Mississippi, James Silver left the state to teach in Indiana.
A more detailed version of this story, with footnotes, appears in Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 211-220.
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