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Articles by Lashawn Harris
Legal News > Your source for information behind the law
By LaShawn Harris Michigan State University (THE CONVERSATION) — When people with mental health problems are in crisis, police often are the first responders. Since many officers have little to no training on how to assess or treat mental illness, these situations can easily become violent. In 2024, for example, 118 people were killed across the U.S. after police responded to reports of someone having a mental health episode. Such cases can lead to charges of police brutality.
More than 40 years after police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment, people still #sayhername
(THE CONVERSATION) When people with mental health problems are in crisis, police often are the first responders. Since many officers have little to no training on how to assess or treat mental illness, these situations can easily become violent. This problem is not new. One of the first cases to receive wide attention and spur reform efforts happened 41 years ago, on Oct. 29, 1984. On that day, a white New York City police officer fatally shot 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs, a Black woman.
More than 40 years after police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment, people still #sayhername Original
When people with mental health problems are in crisis, police often are the first responders. Since many officers have little to no training on how to assess or treat mental illness, these situations can easily become violent. In 2024, for example, 118 people were killed across the U.S. after police responded to reports of someone having a mental health episode. Such cases can lead to charges of police brutality. This problem is not new.
More than 40 years after police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment, people still #sayhername
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More than 40 years after police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment, people still #sayhername
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More than 40 years after police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment, people still #sayhername
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The Fatal Eviction of Eleanor Bumpurs
The police killings of Deborah Danner, Kawaski Trawick, and Win Rozario—all New Yorkers in mental distress who were gunned down by NYPD officers in their homes—inevitably bring to mind Eleanor Bumpurs, the 66-year-old Black grandmother with a history of mental illness who was shot and killed on October 29, 1984, by NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan as she was being evicted from her NYCHA apartment in the Bronx.
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
Sarah Aziza. Catapult, $29 (400p) ISBN 978-1-64622-243-8 Palestinian-American journalist and Fulbright fellow Aziza delivers a visceral debut autobiography that braids mental illness, queer identity, and generational trauma into a striking meditation on exile.
Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine
Chef and cookbook author Hercules (Home Food) blends personal history with political urgency in this poignant account of her family’s roots in Ukraine. What begins as a visceral tale of survival and cultural preservation—Hercules recounts the emotional turmoil of persuading her parents, uncle, and aunt to flee Kakhovka in southeastern Ukraine and reunite in northern Italy after Russia invaded in 2022—soon becomes a meditation on the century that Hercules’s ancestors have spent in the region.
Augustine the African
Catherine Conybeare. Liveright, $31.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-63149-852-7 In this rich and elegant biography, classicist Conybeare (The Irrational Augustine) re-centers the African cultural heritage of St. Augustine.
Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland
A Way with Words radio host Barnette (A Garden of Words) combines philology, etymology, and memoir in this entertaining chronicle of her lifelong love of language. The daughter of educators—including a mother who strictly championed proper grammar—Barnette broadened her linguistic horizons during college, thanks to the mentorship of a retired classics professor and polyglot who taught her all of Oedipus Tyrannus in the original Greek and opened her mind to the subtleties of translation.
A Truce That Is Not Peace
Miriam Toews. Bloomsbury, $26.99 (192p) ISBN 978-1-63973-474-0 Novelist Toews (Fight Night) delivers a haunting meditation on writing and death in her first work of nonfiction. When Toews was invited to a literary conference in Mexico City, organizers asked her to submit an answer to the question “Why do you write?” Personal anecdotes, literary quotes, and biographical snippets about authors who died by suicide tumbled onto the page in response.
HaymarketBooks.org
In the 1920s & 30s, Stephanie St. Clair, a self-made Black woman, ran one of New York City’s many illegal gambling rings, known colloquially as "the numbers." She was successful, rich, beautiful, and tough as nails. She was targeted by police, harassed, and incarcerated. This zine by LaShawn Harris offers a glimpse into the woman who was known in Harlem as Madame Queenie.
Beyond the Shooting: Eleanor Gray Bumpurs, Identity Erasure, and Family Activism against Police Violence
This article recovers the life of Bronx resident Eleanor Bumpurs from historical obscurity, moving beyond her tragic death and departing from disability and legal studies that primarily focus on her killing and New York Police Department officer Stephen Sullivan’s 1987 bench trial. To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author. ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Recovering the Lives of City Women
*This post is part of our joint online roundtable with the Journal of African American History. Photo: Two women sit in the doorway of an empty storefront Harlem, New York City, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.
Why Black Women Joined the Communist Party
During the 1930s, the New Deal’s efforts to drive economic recovery had a dirty not-so-secret. To get the support and votes of southern whites in Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt had to water down relief efforts for African Americans. Even with programs that attempted to be race-blind, the South’s white administrators did their best to deny federal assistance to African Americans. Discrimination and segregation were still the name of the game, even in economic collapse.
Beyond the Shooting: Eleanor Gray Bumpurs, Identity Erasure, and Family Activism against Police Violence
1 Peter Noel, “Group Decries ‘Sham’ Bumpurs Murder Trial,” New York Amsterdam News, January 31, 1987, 10. 2 “The People of the State of New York against Stephen Sullivan,” New York Court of Appeals Records and Brief, 68 NY2D 495, Appellants Appendix, part 4 (Bronx County Indictment No. 394/1985), 820, https://books.google.com/books?id=_u9Mi3ZDHXMC (accessed February 22, 2017).
Beyond the Shooting: Eleanor Gray Bumpurs, Identity Erasure, and Family Activism against Police Violence
LaShawn Harris LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Social History and Journal of Urban History. She is the author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). 1 Peter Noel, “Group Decries ‘Sham’ Bumpurs Murder Trial,” New York Amsterdam News, January 31, 1987, 10.
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