Door to 'Closed Society' Is Opening, Ole Miss Professor Informs Forum

James Silver, author of the bestselling Mississippi: The Closed Society, last night suggested that "my state just might be opening up again, and this time for good."

Addressing a small Ford Hall Forum audience, Silver isolated this summer as "the time the melting began that won't cool until every Mississippian enjoys his rights."

The University of Mississippi professor ticked off incident after incident to prove his thesis, noting with particular joy that Jackson mayor Allen Thompson "has changed overnight from one of the state's greatest racists to a very respectable pleader for law and order."

Tracing the sources of change, Silver praised the Civil Rights Law and the increased attentiveness of Federal marshals and the FBI, but he gave chief credit to the young civil rights workers of the Council of Federated Organizations.

"These kids were very self-disciplined. They proved to Mississippi that a well-to-do white man can live intimately with Negroes," he said.

White Citizens Council Declines

Silver noted that the White Citizens Council is undergoing "a quick and rapid decline." The extremists of the group, he said, are factioning off into the Ku Klux Klan and the Society for the Preservation of the White Race. The moderates have simply stopped paying their dues.

But, Silver observed, the support for the council is growing in the North: "The Jackson Council gets $5 donations from all over the country, mostly from California--only thing that keeps our boys going."

Silver finds many northerners as narrow-minded as any Southern segregationist, and he berated last night's audience for "blaming Harlem hoodlumism on environment, which is right, but refusing to find environment behind the poor Klansman who burns churches on his day off."

Though on leave at Notre Dame this year, Silver wishes to return to Ole Miss, where he has taught history since 1936. A select committee of the University's Board of Trustees is currently weighing his record, and Silver therefore warned his listeners to expect "a very boring speech."

Caution, however, did not prevent him from wondering aloud how any of the state's legislators "got out of seventh grade" and "how a state which gave 87.2 per cent of its vote to Goldwater could claim to be sane."