James Wesley Silver (June 28, 1907 – July 25, 1988) was a history professor and author.
[5] In a speech to the Southern Historical Association in the Fall of 1963, he analyzed the violence with which Mississippi was resisting desegregation.
The speech received widespread media coverage, and he expanded his analysis in a book, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964).
That effort failed, but Silver took a job teaching at University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
He left Notre Dame to teach history at the University of South Florida until he retired in 1982.