The Inaugural Geraldyne Pemberton Diallo Sharpe Annual Lecture — Dr. LaShawn Harris

The BCC History Department
invite you to

The Inaugural Geraldyne Pemberton Diallo Sharpe Annual Lecture

Dr. LaShawn Harris

Wed, Feb 4, 2026, 12pm-2pm, RBSC Rm 211

 

 

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Eleanor Bumpurs, was a 66-year-old Black grandmother 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 Sedgwick Houses in the Bronx. At the time of Bumpurs’s killing, LaShawn Harris was a 10-year-old who lived across the street from Bumpurs. Now an award-winning historian and a professor at Michigan State University, Harris’s latest book, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, shares the full story of Bumpurs’s life and death, all in the context of 1980s New York City. Join Dr. Harris as she retells this important chapter of New York City and U.S. History.

About the Event 
Organized by the History Department at Bronx Community College CUNY, this inaugural lecture is named for the late Dr. Geraldyne Pemberton Diallo Sharpe, who was a beloved and longstanding tenured faculty member of the History Department at Bronx Community College for over forty years. Dr. Pemberton Diallo Sharpe taught in her areas of scholarly expertise which included Africana and African American History across the diaspora.
 
About LaShawn Harris
Dr. 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. She is the award-winning author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy. Harris’s work has been featured in several outlets, including TV-One, Glamour, Huffington Post, Vice, and the History Channel.
   

If we wish to dismantle the structures of racism, sexism, ableism and capitalism that killed Eleanor Bumpers and continue to take Black lives, we need to read this book and tell her story

Robin D.G. Kelley, Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Refreshments and Signed Book Giveaway. Free and Open to the Campus Community and the Public
More info: Dr. Mara Lazda, Chairperson, history@bcc.cuny.edu

 

 

 

 

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