Du Dubois The Litany Of Atlanta

Secondly, Du Bois’ The Litany of Atlanta is essential with depicting the environments and setting in Atlanta on the day of the Atlanta riots. These events led to the uneasiness within the community. Du Bois, himself, also resorted to buying a gun in order to protect his family in case of another event happening like this, in result to witnessing the Atlanta riot. This riot ultimately led Du Bois to creating an organization that protected the African American community later named the NAACP. In The Litany of Atlanta, he expressed the attitudes that surrounded the events aftermath:
In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears and held our leaping hands, but they—did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery, for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one. Turn again our captivity, O Lord!
Although the state militia did come in to soothe the atmosphere and calm the rioters down, the “white mobs continued to terrorize parts of the city for the next two days” (Zainaldin). Du Bois writes this poem as a litany to the grieving mourners. This poem was meant to uplift yet bring about important issues of what is going around them at the same time. “We bow our heads and hearken soft to the sobbing of women and little children” was used in the poem to emphasize the sorrow the remained around the African American community. In the Atlanta environment, they were being sought after and killed because of the beliefs of the “self-righteous” and “omnipotent” white supremacy that foreseen them. In The Journal of Southern History, Gregory Renoff clarifies the setting of Atlanta before the