Martin Luther King, Jr
"I've Been to the Mountaintop"
delivered 3 April 1968, Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters), Memphis, Tennessee
这是马丁.路德.金博士的最后一次演讲，次日他被暗杀。在他发表这篇著名的演讲的时候，他预感到了自己的命运，因为在他来孟菲斯之前已经收到了各种各样的死亡恐吓。但是他用行动作出了回答。他说不要问我帮了别人自己会有什么后果，而要问“如果我不帮助别人，别人会有什么后果”。
演讲的题目出自《圣经》以色列人出埃及的典故，摩西带领以色列人摆脱埃及法老的奴役，去往哪上帝应许的“流奶与蜜之地”–迦南。摩西被上帝带到山顶上，看到了那“应许之地”(promise land)，但他却被告知，他自己不能到达。
马丁.路德.金说“像其他人一样，我也想活的长一些。但是现在我不在乎这一点，我只想尊从上帝的意愿，他已经允许我站在山顶，看到了那应许之地，我也许不能和你们一起到达那里，但是今晚我要告诉大家，人民一定会到哪里!”
马丁.路德.金是一名伟大的基督徒，传道者。他坚持“非暴力”斗争的原则，他用行动实践了耶稣基督“以善胜恶”的.伟大真理。金博士倒下了，爱–看起来是似乎是那么软弱，但是40年过去了，是爱，还是“子弹”(马尔科姆.X的著名演讲《子弹还是选票》)获得了胜利?
这篇演讲中，金博士充满了实践神的国度的热情，他说“我现在什么也不怕，因为我的双眼已经见证了神的荣耀!”。我想起了爱因斯坦读甘地传后的感慨：后代的子孙，很难想象，在我们这个时代，曾经走过这么一位血肉之躯。
Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you. And Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world. I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow.
Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.
I would move on by greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.
I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.
I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.
I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there.
I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.
I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."
Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.
Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."
And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
