2023年经济学人 马丁·路德·金: 最后的国父(2)（在线收听）

    He found his voice as a political leader on December 5th 1955, when he was just 26 and a newly installed pastor in Montgomery, Alabama.

    1955年12月5日，年仅26岁的金成为了一名政治领袖，那时他在阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利市才刚刚成为牧师。

    At Holt Street Baptist Church that evening, four days after the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, he addressed a crowd of black Alabamans.

    当天晚上在霍尔特街浸礼会教堂，也就是罗莎·帕克斯因拒绝在公交车上给白人乘客让座而被捕的四天后，他向阿拉巴马州的黑人发表了讲话。

    They were concerned about the response that their boycott of Montgomery’s buses might provoke from the city’s whites.

    人们担心他们抵制蒙哥马利公交可能会引起该市白人的反应。

    Mr Eig explains that King “needed to embolden without embittering”.

    艾格先生解释说，金“需要大胆而且不带怨恨”。

    He had to acknowledge his audience’s justified anger yet persuade them to protest righteously and hopefully.

    他必须认同听众们正义的愤怒，但又要说服他们正直地、满怀希望地进行抗议。

    Speaking without notes, he advanced a reassuring argument deeply rooted in American and Christian traditions.

    在脱稿演讲时，金提出了一个根植于美国和基督教传统，因而让人安心的论点。

    “We are not wrong,” he declared. “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.

    “我们没有错，”他宣称，“如果我们错了，那么这个国家的最高法院也错了。

    If we are wrong, the constitution of the United States is wrong.

    如果我们错了，那么美国的宪法也是错的。

    If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”

    如果我们错了，那么全能的上帝就是错的。”

    They were not wrong—and that may have been the mid-century civil-rights movement’s greatest strength.

    他们没有错，而这可能是二十世纪中叶的民权运动最强大的力量。

    King’s efforts to overturn legal segregation were at once radical, because African-Americans had been second-class citizens since America’s founding, and based on straightforward American ideals.

    金推翻法律规定的种族隔离的努力既是激进的-- 因为非裔美国人自建国以来就是二等公民 -- 也是基于直接的美国理想。

    He understood that the country’s promises of freedom and equality were hollow if geography or skin colour could invalidate them.

    他明白，如果地理或肤色可以使国家对自由和平等的承诺失效，那么这些承诺就是空洞的。

    Moral suasion was not enough.

    仅靠道德劝说是不够的。

    King also led the most successful pressure campaign in American history, enduring beatings, bombings, imprisonment, scorn, the arms’-length caution of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson’s two-faced truculence, and illegal monitoring and harassment by the FBI.

    金还领导了美国历史上最成功的施压运动，忍受住了殴打、爆炸、监禁、蔑视、约翰·F·肯尼迪与他保持距离的冷淡态度、林登·约翰逊的两面三刀，以及FBI的非法监控和骚扰。

    Within a decade of his address in Holt Street, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

    在霍尔特街演讲发表后的十年内，约翰逊签署了《民权法案》和《投票权法案》。

    He signed the Fair Housing Act, outlawing discrimination in housing, a week after an assassin’s bullet ended King’s life in 1968.

    1968年，一颗刺杀者的子弹结束了金的生命，一周后，约翰逊签署了《公平住房法案》，宣布住房歧视违法。

    Yet by the time King died many considered him yesterday’s man.

    然而，在金去世之前，许多人认为他已经是明日黄花了。

    His opposition to the war in Vietnam alienated some of his compatriots.

    他反对越南战争，从而让他的一些同胞疏远了他。

    The civil-rights movement had splintered, as more radical voices, such as Stokely Carmichael’s, grew louder.

    随着斯托克利·卡迈克尔等更激进的声音变得更加响亮，民权运动已经四分五裂。

    Many white Americans saw ending segregation as the movement’s goal, when, for King, it was just the start: his aim was brotherhood and equality.

    许多美国白人认为结束种族隔离就是民权运动的目标，而对金来说，这只是个开始：他的目标是手足情谊和平等。

    As the 55 years since his death have shown, achieving those through policy is fiendishly difficult.

    在他去世后的55年，正如事实所表明的那样，通过政策实现这些目标难于登天。

    A difficult goal can be worth striving for, however.

    但是，难度大的目标也可以值得为之奋斗。

    And it does King and his quest an injustice to suggest he called only for colour-blindness and not, as he put it in 1967, “a reconstruction of the entire society”, perhaps involving the nationalisation of industry and a guaranteed basic income.

    而且，认为金只呼吁无视肤色，而不是像他在1967年所说的“重建整个社会”（其中可能涉及工业国有化和有保障的基本收入），这对金和他的奋斗而言是不公平的。

    Such ideas may be discomforting, including for those who would enlist King as an opponent of CRT: always sceptical of “the tranquillising drug of gradualism”, he came to believe that most Americans “are unconscious racists”.

    这样的想法可能会让人感到不安，包括那些将金列为反对批判性种族理论的人也会不安。金总是对“渐进主义的镇静剂”持怀疑态度，以至于他开始相信大多数美国人“在无意识中都是种族主义者”。

    But those were still his views, even if expressing them could spell trouble for a teacher in Florida.

    但这些都是金的观点，尽管表达这些观点可能会给佛罗里达州的教师带来麻烦。