Description: An essential Civil Rights-era account of a witness to the Oxford riots and Mississippi's nadir
Brief description: James W. Silver (1907-1988) was professor of history at the University of Mississippi. He is author of Mississippi: The Closed Society, Running Scared: Silver in Mississippi, and Edmund Pendleton Gaines, Frontier General and editor (with John K. Bettersworth) of Mississippi in the Confederacy.
Review Quotes: James W. Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society was originally published on the eve of the murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, at the height of the black freedom struggle of the 1960s. Jim Silver knew his state and its people well, and his blunt, outspoken prose awakened the nation to the daily horrors of life inside a police state. Rereading this classic from the vantage point of half a century, one is immediately struck by the progress black and white Mississippians have made over the years. No other state had so far to go or has covered as much ground. But it also reminds us of the distance still to be traveled.--John Dittmer, professor emeritus of history, Indiana University, and author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi