Who could have imagined that a key chapter in American history would end suddenly when an ex-con, who couldn't pull off a gas-station robbery in a one-light town, squeezed off a well-aimed shot?

But what King did know, almost from the beginning, was that if he didn't get out soon, he'd never get out alive.

"By 1958, the FBI had investigated 58 plots to kill him," wrote Richard Lischer, a Duke University divinity professor, in a biography titled "The Preacher King."

King's eerie prophecy at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis, the night before James Earl Ray lined him up in his gunsights, has become the preamble to that death scene on the balcony.

"I may not get there with you," King intoned in a speech that he wasn't even scheduled to make that night.

It's easy to conclude from that "mountaintop" speech that King had been gripped by a premonition of his death. But it was a night like many others for King.

He had been preparing for that night in Memphis for many years.

" 'Morning after morning, you get up and look into the faces of your children and wife not knowing whether you will get back to them because you are living under the threat of death,' " Lischer quoted King as saying years before Memphis.

He was living under the threat of death in Montgomery, Ala., when he was pressed into service to lead the bus boycott, and in Birmingham when churches were bombed and babies killed to preserve segregation.

By 1965, you could have filled a small auditorium with the people who would have fired that shot if they thought they could get away with it.

An internal memo from the FBI in August 1963 branded him "the most dangerous negro in the future of this nation." It was a feeling shared by many.

King was under FBI surveillance the night he died. FBI agents who watched him through peepholes in the papered-over windows of a firehouse across from the Lorraine Motel rushed to his aid when he fell.

Conspiracy theorists make much of the FBI presence and the fact that it took Scotland Yard, Interpol and the FBI weeks to track Ray before finally nabbing him at London's Heathrow Airport.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there may have been a conspiracy but that it was limited to a small group of bigots in St. Louis who had offered a $50,000 bounty for King.

That none of them has ever been convicted or even tried lends weight to the notion that our government was complicit.

But what I find curious is the timing.

For years, he was the point man in a movement that did more to change America than any movement before or since.

Through it all, he survived dangers seen and unseen. It wasn't until he shifted the focus of his activism from civil rights to economic justice for people of all races that he was killed.

Just a few months before his death, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the "Poor People's Campaign," drawing together poor blacks, Appalachian whites and migrant farm workers.

He traveled to every region in America to form what he would call "a multiracial army of the poor" to demand economic aid and a massive government-jobs program for American cities.

He attacked the American justice system as a tool of the privileged.

"Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice," King wrote. "When they fail in this purpose, they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress."

By the time that shot rang out, King was moving from reformer to revolutionary. He must have known that something had to be done about him.

But he didn't know the fatal shot would be fired by a second-rate crook - and find him in the same modest accommodations as the people he gave his life for. *

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