Quote of the Day #50 — A. Philip Randolph

"Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within."

— A. Philip Randolph

Randolph (1889–1979) founded and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black-led labor union to win a contract with a major American corporation, and later organized the 1963 March on Washington. He came to socialism in New York in the 1910s, but as his biographer Jervis Anderson noted, he embraced it as a Black intellectual trying to understand and address his own group's oppression rather than as a pure universalist, meaning he saw racial and class struggle as linked but not identical. This quote reflects that stance: economic and racial liberation both mattered to him, but neither could be handed down or imposed from outside the group experiencing it.

Randolph spent his career insisting that racial justice and labor organizing were the same fight, most concretely when his threatened 1941 March on Washington pressured FDR into banning discrimination in defense industries. But this quote pushes back a little against a purely class-reductionist reading of that fight, insisting racial "salvation" specifically has to come from within the group itself. Is that in tension with class solidarity across racial lines, or is it a precondition for it?