Bookmarked: In ASU Writing Program, A Life Is Changed & Family Secrets Unearthed

By Jamie Killin
Every family has secrets, but Yvette Johnson learned first-hand that sometimes the history of our families are secrets even to those closest to us.
While participating in a family history writing program at Arizona State University, she learned something that no one in her family knew, that her grandfather, Booker Wright, who was living in Mississippi, had been interviewed about racism for a documentary that aired on NBC in 1966.
The revelation changed her life — leading to a blog, a documentary and now a book, “The Song and the Silence.”
Wright, a Northern Arizona University graduate, was struck by the impact her grandfather’s inclusion in the documentary had made. While his message on the pain of racism touched many, it also led to him losing his job at the whites-only restaurant where he was employed. He was also beat up by a police officer. But that wasn’t the end of his troubles.
Seven years after the airing of the documentary, he was murdered, which Johnson believes was yet another result of his public statement against the controversial integration movement taking place in the South at that time.
She explained that for many white people living in the area at that time, hearing Wright speak was the first time they’d understood the effect of racism and segregation in their community.
“A lot of them had previously felt like the movement was about voting rights or where you sit in a restaurant or where you sit in a bus, but they hadn’t seen the humanity that was being lost,” she said. “They didn’t understand the fight for dignity, but they saw that in my grandfather, which was really amazing.”
After she’d discovered the documentary, she went on to create her own in 2012, while blogging her experiences through an independent study class.
To produce her film, she traveled Greenwood, Miss., knowing that many of those who had been against integration during her grandfather’s life were still alive and living there.
“I was ready to confront them,” Johnson said. “But what I found were immensely kind people, and so my research kind of shifted.”
“I began looking more and more closely at what was the white experience before and during the movement because I think the way that we’ve told the story historically is that they’re all just a bunch of monsters, like anyone white in any of those towns that was against integration was just a horrible racist, and what I found is that that’s not the whole story,” she continued.
Her experience made her re-evaluate her own views on racism, and realize that she could make more progress by looking for the humanity in those who held different beliefs than hers, as opposed to approaching with a carefully laid argument.
That experience, which Johnson shared in her blog, is what led her to write her book, which is as much about her grandfather’s story as it is hers.
“People were just kind of fascinated, yes by my grandfather’s story, but more by how it was informing my own questions and my own struggles to understand my own racial identity and really how to explain race in America to my two sons,” she said.
After several years and six rewrites, “The Song and the Silence” was published this year, prompting many to wonder why there were so many things left unsaid between Johnson’s own family members.
“It’s still really painful for the members of my family to talk about what it was like,” she said. “Sometimes I can start the conversation, and they kind of get excited like ‘Oh yeah, I remember like a barber shop’ or ‘Oh yeah we’d go get pancakes at this place,’ but then the more that we talk it’s like this shadow falls into the room and I can just sense that sadness in them.”
She shared that her family’s reaction to the book has ebbed and flowed, bringing with it fears of exposure of family secrets and unwanted attention, the opening of old painful memories and ultimately an understanding of the benefits of sharing their story.
“I think now they understand that by sharing our story we’re trying to provide a story, we’re trying to help others,” she said.