The need of the South is knowledge and culture,—not in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse of the Boeotian lovers.
This passage asserts that the South's true salvation lies in widespread knowledge and culture, not in material wealth alone.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.