A Mississippi Restaurant Has Been Beloved for Decades. But There’s Another Story to Tell.

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.

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.