The theme of the poem "A Litany of Atlanta" by W.E.B. Du Bois is the (already in 1906) long, terrible history of injustice and violence perpetrated against African-Americans. Du Bois literally sounds out a litany of these travesties: black women have been "ravished and debauched" and both female and male black bodies have been "bought and sold." All of this inhumanity has left a "black and rolling smoke of sin" lingering over the country. Du Bois looks at the landscape of Atlanta after the city had been roiled by riots and sees the violence that white Americans had perpetrated on black Americans for centuries coming back to haunt and hurt whites. In a line very similar to a famous quote from Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice about the cycle of violence, Du Bois notes of the difference between white and black violence, "They train a hundred crimes while we do cure one." The tone of the poem is one of righteous anger, of frustration, of a people calling out to a god in remonstrance for sins gone unpunished. Du Bois even at a point worries that his tone is too extreme, as he implores god to "forgive these wild, blasphemous words." The poem also uses the call-and-response structure common in worship ceremonies in black churches and Catholic masses alike. As the poem comes to a pleading end, language from the Catholic requiem mass is included, echoing back to the phrase "the day of death" in the subtitle of the poem. Theme and tone ultimately fuse in rage.

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois wrote "Litany of Atlanta" in response to the 1906 race riots that swept through Atlanta and represents one of the most heart-felt manifestations of his transition from social scientist to social activist.  An educated historian and sociologist, Du Bois was growing exhausted from the evident lack of social progress being made across the American South in the wake of Reconstruction.  The cumulative effect of continued lynchings and forced, institutionalized segregation with all the inherent indignities that involved motivated his transformation.  As he would later write in "Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept":

"Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort I was doing."

Litany of Atlanta is, consequently, not a scientific exploration of racism; it is an impassioned plea for a “Silent God” to hear the prayers of black people:

“Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are

Made a mockery in Thy sanctuary.  With uplifted hands we

Front Thy heaven, O God, crying:

                We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!

. . .

Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and

dumb to our dumb suffering.  Surely Thou art not

white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing?

                Ah! Christ of all the Pitties!

The theme of Du Bois’ poem is the hopelessness blacks felt regarding white racism and white repression and a system of justice that ignored their plight, and the anguish this deeply religious community felt over their suffering at the hands of others.  The tone is, understandably, angry and bitter.  The decades after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery – and Du Bois was born only three years after the war’s end – had witnessed continued oppression, enforced by white governments across the South, including the State of Georgia, where he was now based.  He saw for himself the indignities and the brutality to which blacks were routinely subjected, and he’d had enough.