The law doesn’t stand for us . . . . All I want is some justice, and I’m in this battle till the very end. We have to keep it going so people don’t forget, because just like it was my mother, it could have been someone else’s mother. — Mary Bumpurs, Eleanor’s daughter
Eleanor Bumpurs. Source: Public domain
On October 29, 1984, while the public housing authorities and police were serving eviction notices in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, the police shot and killed Eleanor Bumpurs, a 66-year-old Black disabled grandmother, in her own home.
The white NYPD officer who fatally shot Bumpurs with a shotgun, Stephen Sullivan, was charged with the murder but ultimately acquitted. This police killing came in the midst of numerous racially charged killings and trials in New York City and beyond.
Historian LaShawn Harris, who was 10 years old when Bumpurs was killed by the police, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street. Read her book, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, to learn more. Read an essay by Harris, The Enduring Legacy of Eleanor Bumpurs, Murdered by the NYPD For Resisting Eviction.
As the Rattling the Bars episode below describes, on average the police kill one Black woman per month, and while the murder of Eleanor Bumpurs was one of many, it sparked a wave of protests and demands for police accountability across New York and the nation.
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