American anti-racism activists

Theodore William Allen (August 23, 1919 – January 19, 2005) was an American independent scholar, writer, and activist, best known for his pioneering writings since the 1960s on white skin privilege and the origin of white identity. His major theoretical work The Invention of the White Race was published in two volumes: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994) and The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (1997). The central ideas of this opus however, appeared in much earlier works such as his seminal Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, published as a pamphlet in 1975, and in expanded form the following year. He claimed that the notion of white race was invented as "a ruling class social control formation."Allen did research for the next quarter century to expand and document his ideas, particularly on the alleged relation of white supremacy to the working class.

James Wesley Silver (June 28, 1907 – July 25, 1988) was a history professor and author. He wrote Mississippi: The Closed Society. He was a professor at the University of Mississippi, then University of Notre Dame, and finally at the University of South Florida. He was targeted for firing despite his tenure at Ole Miss because of his support for civil rights.When rioting erupted on the Ole Miss campus after James Meredith became the University of Mississippi's first African-American student and federal troops moved in to keep order, Silver befriended Meredith. In a speech to the Southern Historical Association in the Fall of 1963, he analyzed the violence with which Mississippi was resisting desegregation. Mississippi was, he said, "a closed society" -- "totalitarian," "monolithic," "corrupt." The speech received widespread media coverage, and he expanded his analysis in a book, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964). His advocacy of racial change had subjected him to hostility in Mississippi and even an attempt by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to have him fired. That effort failed, but Silver took a job teaching at University of Notre Dame in Indiana.He taught at Notre Dame from 1965 until 1969. He left Notre Dame to teach history at the University of South Florida until he retired in 1982.He corresponded with the president of Tougaloo College A. D. Beittel.Photographer Martin J. Dain took photographs of him in Oxford, Mississippi. Silver was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.