November 2022 Bonus Review: Booker's Place
A small town; a wide view
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Greenwood, MS restaurant/club owner Booker Wright was shot by a would-be patron in 1973. While Wright’s killer, Lloyd Cork, was convicted (and remains incarcerated, as far as I can tell), not everyone familiar with Wright’s town and life thinks he acted alone.
[CW for racial violence]
The story
In the beginning, Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story is a film about another film, one that aired on NBC in 1966 and featured Wright doing his singing-the-menu routine at the restaurant, Lusco’s, where he worked — then veering into a discussion about the racist bullshit Wright had to tolerate in order not just to finance his own restaurant, Booker’s Place, but to get from one end of a day to the other in 1960s Mississippi without getting killed. The maker of that film, Frank De Felitta, asked Wright if he was sure he wanted to get into it on the record; Wright said he did, but De Felitta thinks he “shouldn’t have used it.”