• Booker Wright | Yvette Johnson

     
  • Booker Wright lived in Greenwood, Mississippi during the time of the Civil Rights Movement. Greenwood was a small town but was in the thick of that explosive time. Part of Booker's life was spent working as a server at a well-established "whites only" restaurant. He was a favorite there and many people requested to have him as their server. When he wasn't working at his job as a server, he was running his own restaurant on the other side of town - where other Black-owned businesses were and where most of Greenwood's Black population lived. As a successful Black businessman in a place like Greenwood, Booker walked a tightrope. He worked hard to help those down on their luck and to do what he could to look out for kids in the neighborhood - buying a bus so he could drive them to school, offering them meals at his restaurant to help keep them off the street, etc. His success caused him to be disliked by many white people in Greenwood, as well as by some of the Black people in his community. In 1966, circumstances aligned in such a way that Booker briefly appeared in an NBC documentary (Mississippi: A Self Portrait) being filmed in Greenwood. His appearance in the film was a peek into what life was truly like for Black people in his town.
     
    Fast forward four decades. Booker Wright's granddaughter, Yvette Johnson, learns about her grandfather's appearance in the documentary as she is doing research for a family-writing class she's taking at ASU. Yvette - who lives in the Valley - had never known her grandfather, born after he'd died, and knew very little about his life. Her own experience through life had left her full of questions about family, about what seemed to plague them, and about her own identity as a Black woman. Learning about her grandfather and connecting with her family's history catapulted Yvette into a journey she'd never expected to have.
     
    The story of Booker Wright's role in the Civil Rights Movement and the story of Yvette Johnson's own evolution are captured in Yvette's book, The Song and the Silence. She was also intimately involved in producing a film about Booker (Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story) and the original documentary in which he appeared. One of her colleagues in the film's production, Raymond De Felitta, is the son of the man who directed the original documentary, Frank De Felitta. Yvette is a national speaker and workshop leader. She has done a lot of work with Dr. Neal Lester (ASU) to provide training in community policing and deescalation to law enforcement agencies (Humanity 101 in the Workplace: Privilege and Bias) around the state and country.

  • A clip of the original documentary in which Booker appeared.

    Comments (-1)

  • Produced / Directed by Raymond De Felitta and Yvette Johnson

    Comments (-1)