Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City by LaShawn Harris

Hello my lovely readers! It's been a slow reading month compared to how fast I was reading over the summer. Some books have taken me longer to read than others, like this one. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
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.

MY THOUGHTS
The story of Eleanor Bumpurs is tragic and her death was completely unnecessary. Unfortunately, her story is just one of thousands...millions in the U.S. of police brutality. I'm glad this book exists to tell her story.

Harris was a former neighbor of Bumpurs which better explains the writing of this book and why it was so extra, in my opinion.

The writing was extremely flowery, clunky and repetitive and I found myself rolling my eyes more than I wanted to (not due to Bumpurs' story) because the author made simple sentences too over the top with unnecessary quotes, suppositions and extremely long introductions to people.  

This is an example: "Mary learned, as theorized by prominent civil rights leader and Manhattan resident Ella Baker who died two years after Eleanor in 1986, that ordinary working-class people like herself could be agents of societal transformation." Completely unnecessary and clunky. 

But I guess the importance of this book, beyond writing, is to tell Eleanor Bumpurs' story, which is what really matters.