Politics and Prose
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Book Talk: LaShawn Harris — Tell Her Story- with Dr. Sharita Thompson
Posted
September 8, 2025
Views
641
Likes
26
Engagement
4.06%
September 8, 2025
641
26
4.06%
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59:28Now PlayingWatch author LaShawn Harris' book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
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.
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, Se x 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.
Harris is in conversation with Sharita Jacobs Thompson, a Professor in the Social Sciences Department at Prince George’s Community College where she teaches courses in United States and African American History. She is a former Assistant Professor of Civil War Era Studies and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College. Her research focuses on Black Marylanders and their experiences during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era.
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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.
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