A Mississippi Restaurant Has Been Beloved for Decades. But There’s Another Story to Tell.
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For many the myth of racial harmony was more important than the racism the man received.
Lusco’s, a century-old fixture in the Delta, became known for its food, and for Booker Wright, a Black waiter who dared to tell the truth about the Jim Crow-era South
By Brett Anderson
Aug. 16, 2021
GREENWOOD, Miss. — In the Deep South, any restaurant that has operated for nearly a century is bound to have a complicated racial history. Lusco’s is one of those.
Since opening in its current location on the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, the restaurant has served cotton farmers and soldiers returning home from war. By the time Karen and Andy Pinkston took over in 1976, it had survived the Great Depression and Prohibition.
It had seen the violence of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement — and like restaurants across the South, it had become a site of those struggles.
Along the way, Lusco’s won renown far beyond its home state, and helped establish a style of dining unique to the Mississippi Delta, one loosely based on steak and seafood (and, if you’re lucky, tamales) served in timeworn spaces with the electric atmosphere of a juke joint.
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Booker Wright, its most famous employee, knew that divide well.
Mr. Wright worked here for 25 years, mainly as a waiter. That ended in April 1966, immediately after he appeared in “Mississippi: A Self-Portrait,” an NBC News documentary about racism in the Delta. The program included footage of Mr. Wright filmed at Booker’s Place, the bar and restaurant he opened in Greenwood with money earned at Lusco’s — and that he operated while still working at the restaurant. In the documentary, he spoke frankly about what it was like to be a Black waiter in the Jim Crow-era South.
“Some people are nice, some not,” he said. “Some call me Booker, some call me John, some call me Jim.” And some, he said, addressed him with a racist epithet. “All of that hurts, but you have to smile.”
Booker Wright in Booker’s Place, the bar and restaurant he opened with money he saved from waiting tables at Lusco’s. Courtesy of Yvette Johnson
The film shocked many Americans and scandalized Greenwood. Hours after it was broadcast in prime time, a police officer assaulted Mr. Wright, who was then hospitalized, and Booker’s Place was vandalized.
Mr. Wright, who was murdered at age 46 in a 1973 confrontation with a customer at Booker’s Place, and the film were largely forgotten until about a decade ago, when a number of writers, filmmakers and musicians — including Mr. Wright’s granddaughter — produced work recasting him as an unheralded civil rights hero. That work includes a second documentary, a book and an oratorio.
Mr. Young regards the story of Lusco’s and its former waiter as an important chapter in the racial justice struggle in Greenwood. The city was a battleground for voting rights, the site of Stokely Carmichael’s historic “Black power” speech and a short drive from where the 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted before being lynched and thrown into the Tallahatchie River in 1955.
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Years later, Ms. Pinkston learned from Ms. Gory what happened at Lusco’s the night the TV documentary aired. The family’s story, as Ms. Pinkston tells it, centers on the kindness they believe they showed Mr. Wright, who was hired as a teenager, and how his remarks humiliated white residents.
The people who watched Mr. Wright on television at the restaurant were “hurt and upset, because it made them look so bad,” Ms. Pinkston said.
Mr. Wright was working that night and, according to Ms. Pinkston, apologized and left. He never returned to the job. “Ms. Gory told me that it broke her heart,” Ms. Pinkston said.
For her part, Ms. Pinkston likened the treatment Mr. Wright suffered on the job to the impertinence all restaurant servers endure, regardless of race. “It was just a thing where people think they’re better than a server,” she said. “That could happen to anybody.”
Decades after Mr. Wright’s television appearance, Ms. Johnson interviewed white Greenwood residents about it. She said they were still more offended by his puncturing the myth of racial harmony in Greenwood than by the racism he described.
“For a lot of people, betrayal was the dominant response,” she said. “He was saying, ‘This is how I act, because this is how white people expect me to act’ — and then he completely dropped the facade.”
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