James Silver was a Mississippi

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

 historian and history professor at Ole Miss and later at Notre Dame University. He is known for befriending James Meredith

James Meredith

James H. Meredith is an American civil rights movement figure, a writer, and a political adviser. In 1962, he was the first African American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi, an event that was a flashpoint in the American civil rights movement. Motivated by President...

, the University of Mississippi's first African-American student, after he enrolled there. He was pressured to leave the state of Mississippi by segregationists after he published his history of race relations in his state entitled Mississippi: A Closed Society.