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The last Founding Father
最后的国父
Martin Luther King Jr. remains one of the greatest and most misunderstood figures in American history.
马丁·路德·金仍然是美国历史上最伟大和最受误解的人物之一。
King: A Life. By Jonathan Eig.
《马丁·路德·金的一生》，乔纳森·艾格著。
Six months after Florida’s board of education banned “critical race theory” (CRT) —in essence, the study of structural racism—from its classrooms, Ron DeSantis, the governor, introduced legislation further restricting what his state’s teachers could say about race.
佛罗里达州教育委员会禁止在课堂上教授“批判性种族理论”(CRT)，CRT在本质上就是对结构性种族主义的研究，六个月后，州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯提出立法，进一步限制该州教师关于种族问题的言论。
He invoked an unlikely ally: “You think about what MLK stood for,” he told a crowd last year.
他援引了一个不太可能支持他的盟友：“你想想马丁·路德·金主张的是什么”，去年他对群众这样说。
“He didn’t want people judged on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character.”
“他希望人们评判别人不是根据肤色，而是根据那个人的品格优劣。”
Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives, invoked King too: CRT, he said, “goes against everything Martin Luther King junior taught us—not to judge others by the colour of their skin.”
众议院议长凯文·麦卡锡也引用了金的话。他说，批判性种族理论“与马丁·路德·金教给我们的一切背道而驰，他教导我们不要根据肤色来评判别人”。
The phrase “content of their character”, which King used in his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the March on Washington of 1963, has become one of his best known.
“品格优劣”来自金在1963年华盛顿大游行上发表的演讲《我有一个梦想》，这已经成为他的名言之一。
Out of context, it seems to advocate colour-blindness towards individuals above all else, even to suggest that policies which take account of racial inequities are themselves unfairly biased.
断章取义地看，这个说法似乎主张对不同肤色的人一视同仁要高于一切，甚至暗示考虑到种族不平等的政策本身就含有不公平的偏见。
That is a misunderstanding of King’s views—and it is far from the only one in wide circulation.
这是对金的观点的误解，而且除此之外还有很多广为流传的误解。
The reverence with which Americans of all political stripes view him today obscures how deeply divisive he was in his time.
如今，所有政治派别的美国人都对金非常崇敬，这掩盖了他在他所处时代具有的巨大分裂性。
King was a thorny, prophetic, demanding thinker.
金是一位富有争议、有先见之明、要求苛刻的思想家。
He struggled to balance his optimistic patriotism against self-doubt and, later in his life, against his creeping pessimism about America’s ability to overcome its demons.
他努力平衡他的乐观爱国主义和自我怀疑，后来还要平衡他对美国能否战胜种族主义恶魔的逐渐悲观的态度。
Jonathan Eig’s magnificent new biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with King in all his complexity.
乔纳森·艾格的这本传记巨著是对把握金的所有复杂性的一次姗姗来迟的尝试。
His book will inevitably draw comparisons with “America in the King Years”, a three-volume history by Taylor Branch.
不可避免地，人们将把他写的传记与泰勒·布兰奇的三卷本历史著作《金时代的美国》进行比较。
But that trilogy was sprawling and expansive—almost 3,000 pages long, and as much about America between 1954 and 1968 as about King.
但这个三部曲篇幅庞大，长达3000页，既是关于金，也是关于1954年至1968年间的美国。
Mr Eig’s is a more traditional biography, and the book benefits from its narrower focus.
艾格的作品更像传统意义上的传记，较窄的关注点也是这本书的一个优点。
It gives the reader more insight into the multifaceted man himself.
它让读者对这个多面的人有了更深入的了解。
For though King was a great man, he was not a saint.
因为虽然金是一个伟人，但他不是圣人。
He plagiarised, philandered, was unkind and sometimes cruel to his wife, and seems to have suffered from what is now recognised as depression.
他剽窃、玩弄女性、对妻子不友善甚至残酷，似乎还患有现在所说的抑郁症。
He was also funny, fond of good food and politically shrewd.
他也很风趣，喜欢美食，在政治上很精明。
A doting father, he had a gift for friendship and extraordinary reserves of patience and discipline.
他是一位溺爱孩子的父亲，在交朋友方面很有天赋，还有非凡的耐心和自律。
Mr Eig makes his courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with ordinary flaws.
正因为描述了金身上的普通缺点，艾格让他的勇气和道德远见被衬托得格外出众。
King was the product of a middle-class upbringing, and of a family ensconced in Atlanta’s black bourgeoisie.
金是中产阶级抚养方式的结果，来自亚特兰大州的一个优渥的黑人中产阶级家庭。
His father, affectionately known as “Daddy King”, was strong-willed and stern; he preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, making it one of the city’s more prominent black churches.
他的父亲被亲切地称为“金老爹”，是一个意志坚强且严厉的人。他在埃比尼泽浸信会教堂布道，使其成为该市较著名的黑人教堂之一。
King attended Morehouse College, then as now one of America’s best historically black universities, before moving on to seminary in Pennsylvania and graduate school in theology at Boston University.
金就读于莫尔豪斯学院，这所学校至今仍是美国最好的黑人大学之一，然后金进入宾夕法尼亚州的神学院和波士顿大学的神学研究生院继续学习。
Now remembered for his oratory, as a young seminarian, Mr Eig notes, “he earned As in his philosophy classes and Cs in public speaking.”
金因其演讲而被人铭记，但艾格写道，当金还是一个年轻的神学院学生时，“他的哲学课成绩是A，公共演讲成绩是C”。
Mr Eig speculates that some of his northern, white professors “were not enthralled with the black Baptist style”.
艾格推测，他那些来自北方的白人教授“对黑人浸礼会风格的演讲并不感冒”。
The high marks in philosophy, however, are unsurprising: King was a student of ideas for his entire life.
然而，哲学课的高分并不令人惊讶：金毕生都在研究各种思想。
Written in 1963, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is renowned for its moral force and lucid prose.
他写于1963年的《从伯明翰市监狱发出的信》以其道德力量和清晰简练的语言而闻名。
It also bristles with allusions—to the Old and New Testaments, but also Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Neibuhr, Martin Buber and others.
其中还旁征博引，引用的内容包括《旧约》和《新约》，也包括托马斯·阿奎那、莱因霍尔德·尼布尔、马丁·布伯等。
(It did not mention Mohandas Gandhi, whose philosophy of non-violent resistance was perhaps the single greatest influence on King’s life and work.)
（文章中没有提到莫罕达斯·甘地，但甘地的非暴力不合作哲学可能是对金的人生和工作影响最大的思想，没有之一。）
