TELL HER STORY Author Event ~ Detroit

Join us for the evening celebrating the excellent storytelling and inspiring researched Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City. with the award winning author LaShawn Harris. Dr. Harris will be conversation with Andrea Ritchie, author of Practicing New Worlds : Aboilition and Emergent Strategies. This event will include a rich conversation, an opportunity for Q & A and a book signining line for those that purchased the book via this ticket or in store.

Who may want to support the book and or attend this event with us?

Anyone interested in:

• Women's History
• Police Abolition Movements
• Stories of community activism!!!!
• supporting Michigan authors

About the Book:

The life and 1984 M**der of a beloved Black disabled 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 HarrisNow 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 M**der 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 M**der galvanized an entire city. It also shows how possible and critical it is to stand together against racist policing now.

About the Author

LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, the former managing and book review editor for the Journal of African American History (JAAH), and a scholar of African American and Black women’s histories. Her first book, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, won the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Darlene Clark Hine Award for best book in African American women's and gender history and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). Harris’s work has been featured in several outlets, including TV-One, Glamour, Huffington Post, Vice, and the History Channel. Follow her on X @madameclair08.

In Conversation with

Andrea J. Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past four decades. She is cofounder of Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub, she works with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and invest in strategies that will create safer communities. She is a nationally recognized researcher, policy analyst, and expert on policing and criminalization. Ritchie lives in Detroit, Michigan.

Rave Reviews ~ below

“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

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