Writing the Wrongs of History? Mississippi, c. 1945-c. 1970

The drafting of history is often an incremental affair, which tends to be more reliant on gradually expanding the breadth and depth of existing knowledge than on radically reinterpreting it with a single, transformative work. In the case of the history of Mississippi’s turbulent post-war epoch, there has also proven to be another route into the state’s written memory. In 1964, drawing upon his president’s address to the previous year’s Southern Historical Association annual meeting, historian turned historical witness James W. Silver published The Closed Society. In it, he described a state in which the power structure had become so insular and defensive that it had lost its ability for critical self-reflection. In Silver’s account, Mississippi’s political leaders were so desperate to protect their long-standing White supremacist hegemony against the threats posed by civil rights protest that, effectively, they sought to impose their own version of an “official orthodoxy” of White supremacy on the state. The first casualty of that approach, Silver believed, was “the search for historical truth.”1 Silver’s book has been remembered as much for its emotional impact and capturing of a zeitgeist as for its historical detail. Fifty years after it was first published, histories of the period which do not cite Silver’s work are few and far between, and one key scholar of post-war Mississippi still reflexively chooses to refer to the state as “the closed society.”