On October 29th, 1984, Eleanor Bumpurs, a Black disabled mother and grandmother, was gunned down in her Bronx public housing apartment by a white New York Police Department officer wielding a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris had just turned ten years old and lived across the street.
Years later, as an award-winning scholar of Black women’s histories and a New Yorker who had lived in Bumpurs’s neighborhood, Harris became captivated by Bumpurs’s story. “Who was Eleanor before the fatal encounter with the NYPD?” she wonders. “What histories of New York City did Eleanor’s killing expose and what did this American crime story reveal about 1980s urban life and society?”
Now, in Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing that Galvanized New York City (Beacon Press, 2025), Harris delivers a riveting account, centering the totality of Bumpurs’s life outside the moment she became a victim of the state.
In doing so, she shines a light on the urban working-class and poor Black women struggling to survive Ronald Reagan’s America and tracks how the socioeconomic and political landscape of New York City at the time – including the ever-expanding police presence and power over Black lives -adversely transformed Bumpurs’s life and ultimately led to her death.
Harris also tracks the explosion of outrage among New Yorkers, the intense local and national media coverage, and how everyday activists organized one of the first anti-police-brutality campaigns centered on a Black woman.
As many do today, they saw value in their fellow citizens. “Those long committed to upending societal inequalities,” notes Harris, “refuse to turn a blind eye from persons considered disposable.”
Now an award-winning historian, Harris uses eyewitness accounts, legal documents, civil rights pamphlets, and more to look through the lens of her childhood neighbor’s life and death. She renders in a new light the history of anti-Black police violence and of the watershed anti-policing movement Eleanor Bumpurs’s murder birthed.
So many Black women’s lives have been stolen since — Deborah Danner, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Sonya Massey — and still more are on the line.
This deeply researched, intimate portrait of Eleanor Bumpurs’s life and legacy highlights how one Black grandmother’s brutal police murder galvanized an entire city. It also shows how possible and critical it is to stand together against racist policing now.
Book Purchases made through this Amazon link support the New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
See more new books HERE.
Source link
