“We will overcome whatever [it] is the system has become today”: Black Women’s Organizing against Police Violence in New York City in the 1980s

Abstract

This article highlights the history of black women’s efforts to end state-sanctioned violence in New York during the 1980s. It centers on the political activities of Mary Bumpurs and Veronica Perry, two black women who led a grassroots initiative in New York City to combat police violence in black communities. Foreshadowing the kinds of activities organized by the Mothers of the Movement, Mary and Veronica joined forces to combat police brutality, transforming their grief into political action. These women effectively politicized their roles as mothers and daughters to challenge police violence on local and national levels. Through their writing and speeches—which reflected the political milieu of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—Mary and Veronica advanced a political ideology based on a historical contextual understanding of racism. They not only addressed police violence in the 1980s but also drew a link between the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and the New York Police Department to emphasize the historical legacies of racist violence in the United States and the role law enforcement played in maintaining it.

Keywords:

• activism
• black women
• history
• New York
• police violence

Notes

1 Julia Craven, “Black Mothers Get a Standing Ovation at the DNC,” Huffington Post, July 27, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-mothers-dnc_us_57980493e4b0d3568f8517ca (accessed August 17, 2016).

2 Taryn Finley, “Mothers of the Movement Trust Hillary Clinton to End Gun Violence in this Country,” Huffington Post, July 26, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mothers-of-the-movement-trust-hillary-clinton-to-end-gun-violence-in-this-country_us_57978382e4b02d5d5ed2e8b5 (accessed August 17, 2016).

3 Bonnie Kristian, “Seven Reasons Police Brutality is Systemic, Not Anecdotal,” American Conservative, July 2, 2014.

4 On Madame Stephanie St. Clair, see LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). On Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, see Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

5 Joshua Guild, “To Make That Someday Come: Shirley Chisholm’s Radical Politics of Possibility,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 250.

6 Ibid.

7 Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 89. See also Brenda Tindal, “‘Its Own Special Attraction’: Meditations on Martyrdom and the Iconicity of Civil Rights Widows,” in Configuring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity, ed. Klaus Rieser, Michael Fuchs, and Michael Phillips (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2013).

8 Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). While not exclusively about black women, several other works include critical discussions of black women’s activism against police violence and their efforts to shine the light on black women’s vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence. See, for example, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2016); Christopher Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: America’s War on the Vulnerable from Ferguson to Baltimore and Beyond (New York: Pocket Books, 2016).

9 See Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Clarence Taylor, Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to Giuliani Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015); Shannon King, Whose Harlem is This Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era (New York: New York University Press, 2017); David A Goldberg, Black Firefighters and the FDNY: The Struggle for Jobs, Justice, and Equity in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

10 Cheryl Hicks, Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners; Julie Gallagher, Black Women and Politics in New York (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

11 Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2016); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and the Convict Lease System (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Ritchie, Invisible No More.

12 Shannon King, “Ready to Shoot and Do Shoot: Black Working-Class Self-Defense and Community Politics in Harlem, New York during the 1920s,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 5 (2011): 760.

13 Minkah Makalani and Davarian Baldwin, eds., The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 2013).

14 King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?; Marcy Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

15 Marilyn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 3.

16 Michael Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Dominic J Capeci, The Harlem Race Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).

17 “2 N.Y. Officers Charged with Assault: Youth Says Police Tortured Him with Stun Gun,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1985.

18 Charles Bailou, “Relatives Remember Police Slay Victims,” New York Amsterdam News, October 4, 1986.

19 King, “Ready to Shoot and Do Shoot,” 759.

20 Charles Bailou, “Blacks Told to Unite Against Cop Brutality,” New York Amsterdam News, May 17, 1986.

21 Ibid.

22 “Police: The Hostile Army,” New York Amsterdam News, June 29, 1985.

23 Ritchie, Invisible No More, 2.

24 “Reliving the Tragic Bumpurs Incident,” New York Post, October 20, 2016.

25 Don Singleton, “Bumpurs’ Kin Sue City For 10M,” New York Daily News, December 21, 1984.

26 Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White, 88.

27 Ibid., 89.

28 Bailou, “Relatives Remember Police Slay Victims.”

29 Ibid.

30 “Veronica Perry, Teacher 44,” New York Times, October 22, 1991.

31 Cathy Lisa Schneider, Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 60.

32 See Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 107–46; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

33 Veronica Perry, “We Will Not Stand for KKK in Blue Uniforms,” Workers Vanguard, October 4, 1985.

34 Key works on black internationalism include Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History, 86 (December 1999): 1045–77; Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Roderick D. Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); and Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

35 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, ed. Bill Mullen (University: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 33.

36 On Fannie Lou Hamer, see Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

37 Guild, “To Make That Someday Come,” 250.

38 Mary Bumpurs, “They’re Not Going to Get away with What They Did,” Workers Vanguard, October 4, 1985.

39 Ibid., 7.

40 Ibid.

41 “Police Brutality,” New York Amsterdam News, April 26, 1986.

42 Bailou, “Relatives Remember Police Slay Victims.”

43 Selwyn Raab, “State Judge Dismisses the Indictment of Officer in the Bumpurs Killing,” New York Times, April 13, 1985.

44 Robert D. McFadden, “Settlement Reached in Perry Wrongful Death Suit,” New York Times, May 13, 1989.

45 “Veronica Perry, Teacher, 44,” New York Times, October 22, 1991.

46 Simeon Booker, “Ticker Tape U.S.A.,” Jet, November 4, 1991, 12.

47 Douglas Montero, “Lessons of 1984 Unlearned,” New York Post, September 1, 1999.

48 For example, Eleanor Bumpurs also does not address the topic of politics in a 2016 interview. See Stephanie Pagones, “NYPD Shooting of Mentally Ill Woman Invokes Memory of Eleanor Bumpurs,” New York Post, October 20, 2016.

49 Montero, “Lessons of 1984 Unlearned.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keisha N. Blain

Keisha N. Blain teaches history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Set the World On Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and coeditor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016).