Du Bois that examines his life and family history in the context of contemporaneous developments in race relations.

Preceded decades prior by the better-known The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Dusk of Dawn focuses on Du Bois's relationship with Booker T. Washington, his reasons for leaving the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a new concept of race.

In contrast to Washington's Up From Slavery, a blend of slave narrative and autobiography, Dusk of Dawn traces the genealogy of the race concept as it affected Du Bois's life.

Reviewing the book in 1940, Metz P. Lochard, editor of the Chicago Defender, said "[i]t is no mere autobiography in the conventional sense... [Du Bois] very adroitly utilizes his life experience as an axis from which he surveys the whole panorama of American civilization with its vice and virtue, its prejudice and philanthropy, its consistency and grace; and above all with its contradictory and conflicting interpretations of race, Christianity and [d]emocracy.

Du Bois uses these chapters to theorize on race as a psychological complex of irrational logics and habits which are perpetuated to support an economically exploitative society.