The song and the silence

"In this...memoir, Yvette Johnson travels to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the true story of her later grandfather, whose extraordinary act of courage changed both their live. "Have to keep that smile," Booker Wright said in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time, Wright spent his evenings waiting tables for whites at a local restaurant and his mornings running his own business. The ripple effect from his remarks would cement Booker as a civil rights icon because he did the unthinkable: before a national audience, Wright described what life truly was like for the black people of Greenwood, Mississippi"--Dust jacket.