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 has given us a great gift. She has taken Eleanor Bumpurs from a poignant image on a poster and given us a rich sense of Bumpurs’s life and family experiences, a crucial analysis of the 1980s economic and police violence that killed her, and a moving history of her family’s and community’s fight for justice. A must-read and an extraordinary piece of research.”
—Jeanne Theoharis, author of King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South
“Some of the most powerful people in New York City tried to convince the world that Eleanor Bumpurs’s life did not matter. Brilliant historian LaShawn Harris has corrected the record with a beautiful and heartbreaking account of a beloved matriarch who fell victim to the unforgiving forces of poverty, housing insecurity, and police violence. An excellent study of the 1980s that captures the heart and soul of the social movements that foreshadowed calls to ‘Say her name.’ A timely and necessary book.”
—Marcia Chatelain, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
“Harris’s Tell Her Story, a powerful and poignant rescuing of the life and tragic murder of Eleanor Bumpurs, will both haunt and inspire. Told against the backdrop of the vicious 1980s, her searing narrative reminds us that this nation’s too-regular and brutal police killings of Black women have always been met by extraordinary family and community mobilization, and the demand for justice. As it also makes clear, it is long past time for America to deliver on that demand.”
—Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy