What first inspired you to research and write about Eleanor Bumpurs?LaShawn Harris is an associate professor at MSU’s College of Social Sceince.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 name in hip hop music and in movies, particularly Spike Lee\u2019s 1986 film \u201cShe\u2019s Gotta Have It\u201d and his 1989 film \u201cDo the Right Thing.\u201d 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\u2019 life prior to her killing. I wanted to know about her personal histories.<\/p>\n
My interest in Eleanor\u2019s interior life was also inspired by historian Brenda Stevenson\u2019s \u201cThe Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins,\u201d filmmaker Ryan Coogler\u2019s \u201cFruitvale Station,\u201d Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin\u2019s \u201cRest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin,\u201d and journalist Matt Taibbi\u2019s \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street.\u201d These works underscore victims\u2019 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\u2019 families \u2014 those left behind to mourn and pursue legal justice.<\/p>\n
Why did you feel it was important to portray her full life, not only her death?<\/p>\n
Primarily framing Eleanor Bumpurs as a poor and disabled grandmother and police-shooting victim is problematic. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
What did happiness look like for her?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s broad vision of happiness aligned with working-class Black women\u2019s historic quest for full citizenship, bodily autonomy, equitable employment and housing, and neighborhood safety. On a personal level, Eleanor\u2019s happiness was rooted in her ability to financially support and care for and protect her seven children.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cMr. and Mrs. North\u201d or \u201cStella Dallas,\u201d 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 \u2014 to a time when her female kin were in their respective kitchens talking or singing and preparing turnip greens, salt pork, cornmeal and more.<\/p>\n
For many Black women of Eleanor\u2019s generation, nostalgic memories about family and food were a source of psychic relief. Personal recollections revived some women\u2019s spirits, as well as comforted them during moments of economic uncertainty, family loss, and physical and mental health breakdowns.<\/p>\n
How did her eviction and killing spark political mobilization in New York?<\/p>\n
Collectively, community activists and political leaders reasoned that Eleanor Bumpurs\u2019 eviction and police killing were symbolic of various socioeconomic and political issues plaguing the city \u2014 such as reduced city services that aided the poor, unemployed and elderly; the denial of tenants\u2019 rights; the city\u2019s 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\u2019 handling of Eleanor\u2019s expulsion to municipal inefficiency and neglect.<\/p>\n
New Yorkers\u2019 outrage about Eleanor\u2019s killing culminated into one of New York City\u2019s 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\u2019s killing and legal action against all persons and city agencies involved in the deadly eviction.<\/p>\n
What does Eleanor Bumpurs\u2019s story teach us about the long-term effects of police violence on families?<\/p>\n
Police violence impacted families in various ways. Many suffered long after victims\u2019 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 \u2018an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.\u2019 As victims and survivors of slow violence, families experienced harms that unfolded across time \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 lives. Families echoed the words of Gwen Carr, mother of police brutality victim Eric Garner: \u2018Our 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.<\/p>\n