The history of a university professor's daring stand for principles during the movement for civil rights in Mississippi and the history behind the writing of his incisive analysis entitled Mississippi: The Closed Society in 1964

James Silver was an alien when he arrived in Mississippi during the Great Depression, and when he left in 1964, he felt that it was the state that was the alien.

When he wrote Mississippi: The Closed Society, he went publically on record as a fierce opponent of segregation and its forces in the Magnolia State. This incisive analysis and denunciation of segregation, Mississippi-style, appeared in the climax of the civil rights movement there. It was published fortuitously on the day after the discovery of the bodies of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, and it became a sensation both to racial liberals and to racial conservatives, though for different reasons.

Silver, recalled to today as a teacher who by no means insisted that students agree with his views, possessed a talent for inspiring independent thinking and reason. This native New Yorker who grew up in North Carolina came to Mississippi during the depression to teach at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. He remained for thirty years, with an outsider's perspective and a deep affection for his adoptive home. Yet, he could never adjust to the great contrast in social conditions in Mississippi.

It became alarmingly evident to Silver that the state system was founded upon "the false orthodoxy of the closed society" and that the search for historical truth had "become a casualty in embattled Mississippi." After the Meredith crisis at the university in 1962 Silver's speeches and papers exposing prevailing conditions brought charges from the educational authorities who questioned his fitness as a member of the university faculty. The resulting conflict stirred both sympathetic support from Silver's admirers and recriminations from conservative politicians and most of the state press.

In Running Scared Silver expresses his impatience with the forms of extremism on both sides of the racial issue. Although focused principally upon the history of his efforts to loosen the white society's powerful grip, Silver frowns upon certain elements in the civil rights movement. He is critical of the black power wing that radicalized the movement and became vulnerable to charlatans.

Silver recounts his long association with the great author William Faulkner in Oxford. They shared opinions about bigotry, considered themselves racial moderates, and hoped that the South would reform itself without force from the outside.

Running Scared is Silver's defense of a position that brought peril to both his professional and his physical security when he took a stand against objectionable conditions. It tells of how his personal views, in conflict with public attitudes, kept him in a position he describes as "running scared." But with the eruption of the Meredith crisis at the university Silver stopped running against his principals and fearing reprisals for publically opposing segregation.

Appended to Silver's narrative are letters, articles, and speeches which reveal the history of his growing alienation from Mississippi and document his decision to stop "running scared."