Ask the expert: Historian explores how Eleanor Bumpurs’ killing reshaped New York City’s fight for justice

In 1984, the police killing of Eleanor Bumpurs during an eviction shocked New York City and ignited one of the first anti-police brutality campaigns centered on a Black woman.

Four decades later, LaShawn Harris, an associate professor in Michigan State University’s Department of History, revisits Bumpurs’ life and legacy in her new book, “Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs and the Police Killing that Galvanized New York City.” Harris draws on personal memories, extensive research and interviews to illuminate Bumpurs as more than a victim — showing the woman behind the headlines and the movement her death inspired.

What first inspired you to research and write about Eleanor Bumpurs?

Being raised in the Bronx, I grew up seeing a 1981 New York Daily News picture featuring 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs. I grew up hearing Eleanor Bumpurs’ name in hip hop music and in movies, particularly Spike Lee’s 1986 film “She’s Gotta Have It” and his 1989 film “Do the Right Thing.” And my family lived across the street from Eleanor Bumpurs. I was 10 years old when she was killed. These personal connections inspired years of scholarly research. I was curious about what happened to her and my Bronx community (Morris Heights) on Oct. 29, 1984. And I was curious about Eleanor Bumpurs’ life prior to her killing. I wanted to know about her personal histories.

My interest in Eleanor’s interior life was also inspired by historian Brenda Stevenson’s “The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins,” filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station,” Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin’s “Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin,” and journalist Matt Taibbi’s “I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street.” These works underscore victims’ less familiar interior lives, highlighting their ambitions, familial relationships, and pleasures and fears. These important texts humanize victims. They also illuminate the impact of police- and state-sanctioned violence on victims’ families — those left behind to mourn and pursue legal justice.

Why did you feel it was important to portray her full life, not only her death?

Primarily framing Eleanor Bumpurs as a poor and disabled grandmother and police-shooting victim is problematic. It’s important not to reduce her to a singular narrative. Telling a one-dimensional story about her ignores a compilation of life experiences that informed her identity. Concentration on her death, the neglect and violence she endured as an unprivileged citizen, and her mental health condition freezes her in time and confines her to events that occurred on Oct. 29, 1984. Exploring her full biography allows the public to invest in the many lives that she lived.

What did happiness look like for her?

Eleanor Bumpurs was a child of Jim Crow segregation. She witnessed and experienced how southern and northern whites denied Blacks first-class citizenship. Despite such challenges, Black women like her strove for happiness. Eleanor’s broad vision of happiness aligned with working-class Black women’s historic quest for full citizenship, bodily autonomy, equitable employment and housing, and neighborhood safety. On a personal level, Eleanor’s happiness was rooted in her ability to financially support and care for and protect her seven children.

She also found pleasure in cooking. Cooking was her love language. While listening to one of her favorite mid-20th-century radio programs such as “Mr. and Mrs. North” or “Stella Dallas,” or humming or singing one of her favorite gospel songs, she, with little money, fried fish and chicken and prepared nonprocessed desserts and fresh vegetables for her family. As the aroma of buttery biscuits or fried bacon filled her various New York apartments, she could be transported back to her home in the South — to a time when her female kin were in their respective kitchens talking or singing and preparing turnip greens, salt pork, cornmeal and more.

For many Black women of Eleanor’s generation, nostalgic memories about family and food were a source of psychic relief. Personal recollections revived some women’s spirits, as well as comforted them during moments of economic uncertainty, family loss, and physical and mental health breakdowns.

How did her eviction and killing spark political mobilization in New York?

Collectively, community activists and political leaders reasoned that Eleanor Bumpurs’ eviction and police killing were symbolic of various socioeconomic and political issues plaguing the city — such as reduced city services that aided the poor, unemployed and elderly; the denial of tenants’ rights; the city’s failing mental health care system; and the diverse ways the police wreaked havoc on underserved communities of color. Moreover, city folks connected the New York City Housing Authority and NYPD, and other city agencies’ handling of Eleanor’s expulsion to municipal inefficiency and neglect.

New Yorkers’ outrage about Eleanor’s killing culminated into one of New York City’s most important social justice campaigns of the 1980s. From the Bronx to Harlem to Brooklyn, city activists and politicians like Revs. Herbert Daughtry and Wendell Foster organized street protests and vigils; community leaders established grassroots political organizations like the Eleanor Bumpurs Justice Committee; Bronx teenagers, musicians and writers such as poet Audre Lorde created songs and poems for Eleanor; and city residents embarked on letter-writing campaigns to elected city and state officials, demanding investigations into Eleanor’s killing and legal action against all persons and city agencies involved in the deadly eviction.

What does Eleanor Bumpurs’s story teach us about the long-term effects of police violence on families?

Police violence impacted families in various ways. Many suffered long after victims’ deathly encounter with police and long after media headlines, justice campaigns and legal pursuits ceased. These families experienced what scholar Rob Nixon calls a slow violence. This form of violence is gradual and veiled, delayed in destruction, and ‘an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ As victims and survivors of slow violence, families experienced harms that unfolded across time — in the days, months and years after violent and explosive events. The long-term impact of slow violence potentially places some families in jeopardy of experiencing mental health crises and feelings of hopelessness and anger and distrust toward law enforcement. Moreover, police killings tore many families apart, murdering their souls and leaving them mentally, physically and psychologically broken.

A new generation of family activists have long been doing the necessary work needed to humanize their kin. This is an unfortunate task for families. They should only have the responsibility of mourning their loved ones. But longstanding racial stereotypes about African Americans as criminal and as individuals unworthy of compassion and justice compelled families to share with the public intimate details about their loved ones. They wanted the public to see their kin beyond racist imageries and beyond the violence that ended their kins’ lives. Families echoed the words of Gwen Carr, mother of police brutality victim Eric Garner: ‘Our loved ones were much more than a news headline. [They] were people with hopes and dreams like anyone else and we all agreed that they deserved to be remembered for more than just their violent ending.

Read LaShawn Harris' article on Eleanor Bumpers in The Conversation.