Henry Dumas Wrote About Black People Killed By Cops. Then He Was Killed By A Cop

"A young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station," wrote Toni Morrison in the invitation to a posthumous book-launch party she threw for the writer in 1974, six years after he died. "A transit cop" — who was white — "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.

Dumas' final scene echoed a theme he turned to again and again in his writing: violent confrontations between white men and black men. The work he left behind — short stories that range from hard realism to science fiction, an almost finished novel, volumes of poetry, and even a few accompaniments to the work of the mystical jazz legend Sun Ra — contains bitingly sharp depictions of racial tension in America that, in an almost unbelievably eerie way, speak to his own fate.

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