Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story Directed by Raymond De Filitta

All he did was speak the truth.

In 1966, filmmaker Frank DeFelitta made a documentary for NBC News about life in the Mississippi Delta. The film outraged many white Southerners because it included an extraordinary scene featuring a black, illiterate waiter at a ‘whites only’ restaurant in Greenwood, MS, in which Booker Wright exploded the myth of who he was and how he felt about his position serving the white community. The fallout for him was extreme: He lost his job, was beaten and ostracized by those that considered him ‘one of their own’. Forty-six years after his televised appearance, Booker’s granddaughter, Yvette Johnson, and Frank’s son, director Raymond DeFelitta, are in search to discover who Booker Wright was and what led him to commit this courageous act of ‘accidental activism’.