Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City

The life and 1984 murder of a beloved Black grandmother that changed community activism forever--and sparked the ongoing movement against racist policing and brutality

#SayHerName: The story of Eleanor Bumpurs, told for the first time by decorated historian and Bumpurs’s former neighbor LaShawn Harris

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street.

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.

LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, the former managing and book review editor for the Journal of African American History (JAAH), and a scholar of African American and Black women’s histories. Her first book, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, won the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Darlene Clark Hine Award for best book in African American women’s and gender history and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). Harris’s work has been featured in several outlets, including TV-One, Glamour, Huffington Post, Vice, and the History Channel. Follow her on X @madameclair08.