"A young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station," reads an invitation by Toni Morrison for a posthumous book-launch party she threw for Dumas in 1974, six years after he died. "A transit cop" ā who was white ā "shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read."
In the nearly 50 years since Henry Dumas was killed, not much more has come to light about what happened on the night of his death. No witnesses came forward to testify. Police records were lost in a bureaucratic shuffle. Harlem, where Dumas moved as a young man after growing up in rural Arkansas, had erupted in large-scale protests over the police killings of black and brown men several times before the writer was killed. But Dumas' death hardly made the news. With so little information to draw from, it's as if the last pages of his life were torn out.
[For more of this story, written by Beenish Ahmed, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/co...-was-killed-by-a-cop]
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