The Beginning: A Novel

Just as the blacks and whites of a small Southern town think they're moving toward racial equality, civil rights workers arrive and violence erupts. Patrick D. Smith, award-winning author, wrote The Beginning in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. He offered an inside perspective on its effect on the people, both black and white, caught in the upheaval of the changing South. Thirty years have passed and it is time to bring this novel back to a new generation of readers to reassess the times and the decisions of those who lived through them.