BFSA Bookstore 

Author and Former UA Football player Mr. Andrew Pernell was featured on BFSA Social Justice Series

Alabama Crimson Tide: 1967 and the Undercurrents of Integration
The First Five—Before the Season Changed
Over the years, quite a few people have written about the story of The First Five. There are several versions of the integration story and there are many commentaries on those University of Alabama Crimson Tide days. To my knowledge, none of us First Five who were actually there as participants have recorded the events of the times as weexperienced them. I was the only one of the first five who survived and returned after the spring A-Day game of 1967; therefore, my account of events may be more comprehensive and enriching than others’ accounts. This book, I would wager, presents the historicity of those things of which I write, more accurately than any other written account.

​The title of this book is a bit of a spin-off of Prof. John David Briley’s book Career in Crisis, Paul Bear Bryant and the 1971 Season of Change. Prof. Briley’s book shed some light on the season before the change, but with an emphasis on the changing season itself and its aftermath; however, the focus of this book highlights significant and relevant events before the season changed, interspersed with my commentary on race–which lies at the heart of this memorialization.  Watch interview: youtu.be/zABf-Jk0XIY

Authors Dr. Kris Erskine and Dr. Chance Lewis was featured on BFSA’s Social Justice Series: The Plight, Path and Progression of the Black Male. This book was featured in their presentation, visit BFSA’s Zoom recordings to watch the presentation. 
​Watch interview  youtu.be/0dxIu4D94qQ.

The second edition of this book addresses the African American male and the communities that produce them. Get ready for solutions to struggles, answers to questions and directions for dilemmas! The authors are passionate about providing life application solutions to the problems facing men today! In this book, you will discover how to:- Repair your Vertical Relationship with God- Mend the relationship with your family- Improve academic achievement of African American males- Reverse unemployment and underemployment- Overcome substance abuse and reclaim your life- Get your money the right way. Get your copy today!

Dr. Charles Steele Jr. was featured during BFSA’s Social Justice Series Vol.1 Systemic Racism and COVID-19’s Impact on Mental Health. He encouraged all of our attendees to “get this book”. Navigate to the following link to watch the presentation: youtu.be/rn7g7hwk_RU​

The Economic Institute Writes in their 2017 publication, “To scholars and social critics, the racial segregation of our neighborhoods has long been viewed as a manifestation of unscrupulous real estate agents, unethical mortgage lenders, and exclusionary covenants working outside the law. This is what is commonly known as “de facto segregation,” practices that were the outcome of private activity, not law or explicit public policy. Yet, as Rothstein breaks down in case after case, private activity could not have imposed segregation without explicit government policies (de jure segregation) designed to ensure the separation of African Americans from whites”. Read More…

Opening the Doors is a wide-ranging account of the University of Alabama’s 1956 and 1963 desegregation attempts, as well as the little-known story of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s, own civil rights movement.In the months directly following Governor Wallace’s infamous stand, Tuscaloosa became home to a leader of a very different kind: twenty-eight-year-old African American reverend T. Y. Rogers, an up-and-comer in the civil rights movement, as well as the protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. After taking a post at Tuscaloosa’s First African Baptist Church, Rogers began laying the groundwork for the city’s own civil rights movement. In the summer of 1964, the struggle for equality in Tuscaloosa resulted in the integration of the city’s public facilities, a march on the county courthouse, a bloody battle between police and protesters, confrontations with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a bus boycott, and the near-accidental-lynching of movie star Jack Palance. Relying heavily on new firsthand accounts and personal interviews, newspapers, previously classified documents, and archival research, Hollars’s in-depth reporting reveals the courage and conviction of a town, its university, and the people who call it home. Get your copy today!

BFSA’s Finance Committee Chair, Ms. Latrisa Pugh, authored a book in personal money management. Get your copy Today !! 
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Like our physical health, financial well-being is impacted by the choices we make over time. Most times being in a bad financial place is the result of a series of decisions that negatively impact our standing. Similarly, it will take a determined mindset and consistent actions to develop positive financial habits. In this resource, a devotional approach paired with workbook activities offers a syncing of faith and finances in a practical way for readers. In addition, Author and Financial Coach, Latrisa Pugh, candidly shares personal anecdotes from her financial successes and failures extending her connection to readers. No stuffy, boring, hard to understand financial advice here! Ultimately, readers will identify beliefs and develop habits to lead them to both better financial standing and learning to live the best version of their lives.

BFSA’s former President, Dr. Utz McKnight, authored a biography of Frances E.W. Harper: author, educator and activist of the Abolitionist Movement.

Free Black woman, poet, novelist, essayist, speaker, and activist, Frances Watkins Harper was one of the nineteenth century’s most important advocates of Abolitionism and female suffrage, and her pioneering work still has profound lessons for us today.
In this new book, Utz McKnight shows how Harper’s life and work inspired her contemporaries to imagine a better America. He seeks to recover her importance by examining not only her vision of the possibilities of Emancipation, but also her subsequent role in challenging Jim Crow. He argues that engaging with her ideas and writings is vital in understanding not only our historical inheritance, but also contemporary issues ranging from racial violence to the role of Christianity.
This lucid book is essential reading not only for students of African American history, but also for all progressives interested in issues of race, politics, and society. Get your copy today!

Dr. Utz McKnight, former BFSA President, Author.

​An original contribution to political theory and cultural studies this work argues for a reinterpretation of how race is described in US society. McKnight develops a line of reasoning to explain how we accommodate racial categories in a period when it has become important to adopt anti-racist formal instruments in much of our daily lives.

The discussion ranges over a wide theoretical landscape, bringing to bear the insights of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Michel Foucault, Cornel West and others to the dilemmas represented by the continuing social practice of race. The book lays the theoretical foundation for a politics of critical race practice, it provides insight into why we have sought the legal and formal institutional solutions to racism that have developed since the 1960s, and then describes why these are inadequate to addressing the new practices of racism in society. The work seeks to leave the reader with a sense of possibility, not pessimism; and demonstrates how specific arguments about racial subjection may allow for changing how we live and thereby improve the impact race continues to have in our lives. Get your copy today!

Dr. Trudier Harris, BFSA Finance Committee Member, Author

A wide-ranging, spirited collection of personal essays about growing up black and Southern

Like Maya Angelou and bell hooks before her, Trudier Harris explores her complicated identity as a black woman in the American South. By turns amusing and probing, Summer Snow lays out in a series of linked essays the formative experiences that shaped Harris into the writer and intellectual she has become.

With passion and eloquence, Harris writes about the creation of her unique first name, how porch-sitting is in fact a creative Southern tradition, and how insecurities over her black hair (“the ubiquitous hair”) factored into her self-image. She writes about being a “black nerd” as a child, and how the black church influenced her in her early years. But she also writes about more troubling topics, such as the price blacks have paid for integration, and the “staying power of racism.” In one moving piece, Harris remembers a white teenager propositioning her for sex in exchange for five dollars. Unflinching in her assessment of white Southern culture, yet deeply attached to a South many black intellectuals have abandoned, Harris in Summer Snow takes readers on a surprising tour of one woman’s life, loves, and lessons.

Trudier Harris is the author of numerous books, including Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature and Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Get your copy today!

Dr. Trudier Harris, BFSA Member, Author

By lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people, contends Trudier Harris, white Americans were performing a rite of exorcism designed to eradicate the “black beast” from their midst, or, at the very least, to render him powerless and emasculated. Black writers have graphically portrayed such tragic incidents in their writings. In doing so, they seem to be acting out a communal role―a perpetuation of an oral tradition bent on the survival of the race.

Exorcising Blackness demonstrates that the closeness and intensity of black people’s historical experiences sometimes overshadows, frequently infuses and enhances, and definitely makes richer in texture the art of black writers. By reviewing the historical and literary interconnections of the rituals of exorcism, Harris opens up the hidden psyche―the soul―of black American writers. Get your copy Today!

A recommended read by, Dr. Cassandra Simon, BFSA Secretary and E-Board Member.

African-American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, one of the first scholars to study African-American history and has been referred to as the “father of black history.” His announcement of the celebration of “Negro History Week” in February 1926 has been cited as the precursor to Black History Month. First published serially in 1903, “The Mis-Education of the Negro” is Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s thesis regarding the education, or lack thereof, of African Americans in the early part of the 20th century. His principal assertion was that African Americans were not really being taught in American schools but rather that they were being culturally indoctrinated. Dr. Woodson was highly critical of this trend for as he writes “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.” Dr. Woodson’s book is a compelling argument regarding the need for better education in the African American community which is surprisingly still relevant today. Get your book today!

Dr. Bryan Fair, BFSA Member, Author

​The Constitution of the United States, writes Bryan Fair, was a series of compromises between white male property holders: Southern planters and Northern merchants. At the heart of their deals was a clear race-conscious intent to place the interests of whites above those of blacks.

In this provocative and important book, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories—America’s and his own—to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action. How can it be, Fair asks, that, after hundreds of years of racial apartheid during which whites were granted 100% quotas to almost all professions, we have now convinced ourselves that, after a few decades of remedial affirmative action, the playing field is now level? Centuries of racial caste, he argues, cannot be swept aside in a few short years.

Fair ambitiously surveys the most common arguments for and against affirmative action. He argues that we must distinguish between America in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era—when the law of the land was explicitly anti-black—and today’s affirmative action policies, which are decidedly not anti- white. He concludes that the only just and effective way in which to account for America’s racial past and to negotiate current racial quagmires is to embrace a remedial affirmative action that relies neither on quotas nor fiery rhetoric, but one which takes race into account alongside other pertinent factors.
Championing the model of diversity on which the United States was purportedly founded, Fair serves up a personal and persuasive account of why race-conscious policies are the most effective way to end de facto segregation and eliminate racial caste. Get your copy today!