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The Shadow of Years
Du Bois's own life told in miniature: birth in Great Barrington five years after Emancipation, the Burghardt family's two centuries in the Berkshires, Fisk, Harvard, Atlanta University, the break with Booker T. Washington, and the founding of the NAACP and The Crisis — closing with the fiftieth-birthday vantage point the whole book writes from. Followed by 'A Litany at Atlanta,' Du Bois's call-and-response prayer written after the 1906 Atlanta race riot.
Du Bois's ancestry and Berkshires childhoodFisk, Harvard, and Atlanta UniversityThe break with Booker T. WashingtonFounding the NAACP and The Crisis'A Litany at Atlanta' (1906 Atlanta riot)