The incidents are more than 46 years apart, but they began in similar fashion.
On Aug. 9, 2014, a young man - Michael Brown, 18 - was killed by a police officer on a city street in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, after some kind of confrontation.
On April 4, 1968, U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was killed while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to help lead protests involving a sanitation workers' labor dispute.
Both shootings were followed by protest marches - including Lincoln University students smashing windows in Jefferson City's business district that resulted in Highway Patrol and National Guard troops adding their work to local law enforcement, following the King murder - sometimes, violent demonstrations, and a forceful law enforcement response that also included patrol and Guard troops.
There are some significant differences.
While there were a few, generally small demonstrations in other parts of the country supporting the demonstrations in Ferguson, the North St. Louis County community remained the principal location for confrontation and protests.
There was a fire that heavily damaged a gas station near the shooting scene, and some of the protesters were injured when officers fired rubber bullets, smoke bombs and tear gas into the crowds.
But no one else was killed.
After the King assassination, violence and rioting erupted in a number of U.S. cities - including Kansas City - with other deaths and numerous injuries reported in those confrontations.
Arson fires destroyed nearly 100 buildings in Kansas City and also were reported in other cities.
"I think the similarity that comes to the top of my head is that part of the problem - especially with the demonstrations - was a lack of communication," said historian and former Lincoln University professor Tony Holland.
"Certainly, there wasn't conversation - (and), in both cases, you have emotion."
In Ferguson, he noted, area residents already were dealing with "a kind of history of harassment of young - especially young black - males in that general vicinity. I think, also, there was a sense of disrespect that went along with the fact that (authorities) left the young man lay on the ground for four hours."
The initial demonstrations were peaceful that Saturday afternoon after Brown died, but violence erupted in the late evening as police built up their presence by adding armored vehicles and protective gear.
With mostly peaceful demonstrations during the day, and more confrontational incidents at night - including demonstrators throwing rocks and, sometimes, Molotov cocktails at the law enforcement officers from the Ferguson department and several others - the cycle played out in Ferguson for more than a week, even after Gov. Jay Nixon negotiated a transfer of law enforcement authority from the St. Louis County Police to the Missouri Highway Patrol.
The governor also imposed an early morning curfew to keep people off the streets, and called out Missouri National Guard units to help the law officers control the peace and enforce the curfew.
Bob Quinn, a Ferguson native who now is a lobbyist in Jefferson City, served on the Ferguson City Council in the 1980s, then served three terms in the Missouri House representing the community.
"What's happening there could have happened in a thousand communities across the country," Quinn said. "When the economy's been as bad as it is, for as long as it's been, and people who, traditionally, have a harder time (finding jobs) even when the economy's good - that just creates a desperate situation."
Quinn added: "I've seen the folks on Facebook - "Why don't these people get a job?' They'd work if there were jobs - that's the disconnect."
Holland said the demonstrations and riots following the 1968 King assassination expressed some specific frustrations for African Americans, who already had seen other civil rights figures gunned down, including Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
King's murder "was the last straw" for those people, Holland said.
The morning after King's death, Lincoln University's Student Government Association held an emotional, but dignified, memorial service in a packed Richardson (now known as Mitchell) Auditorium.
But in Jefferson City, some people had another emotion to vent.
On April 3, the day before King's killing, the News Tribune published a local editorial arguing that "all Americans" should "take a good, hard look at Dr. Martin Luther King" because - in spite of his preaching non-violence - "the so-called civil rights leader is one of the most menacing men in America today."
The following day - hours before King was killed in Memphis - the newspaper published a syndicated column by Maj. Gen. T.A. Lane, which added fuel to people's frustration.
"Martin Luther King is an apostle of Marx, and Marx was an apostle of violence," Lane wrote. "The King peace front is a routine tactic of the class warfare."
Holland thinks African Americans, including Lincoln University students, might have been more willing to stew about the two-day attack, but let it go, if it had not been for the "unhappy coincidence" of King's death coming at the same time.
"That just added fuel to the fire," he said.
Former Cole County Sheriff John Hemeyer was an LU student in 1968, and was on the Lincoln campus when students launched their "demonstration at the News Tribune office."
The book "Missouri's Black Heritage," which Holland and fellow historian Gary Kremer originally wrote with LU Professor Lorenzo Greene and updated after Greene's death, reports the demonstration was to be "a peaceful march" but, "after being told by the editor that the (Lane) column could not be rescinded and that no apology would be forthcoming, the students responded by breaking windows in the (News Tribune) building."
From there, Hemeyer recalled, "The march went back to Lincoln University. Somebody broke a window at Steppelman's Gun Store (618 E. High St.) and took some guns out of the window.
"And then it really ratcheted up."
Police reported that seven shotguns and a cross bow were taken from the store.
Hemeyer remembers "watching the Highway Patrol get off a bus and march, in lock-step, up to the demonstrators" on the LU campus.
Greg Gaffke, another LU graduate who now serves on the school's Board of Curators, added: "I can remember the patrol coming off that bus and going single-file through the crowd - and I was so grateful that cooler heads prevailed.
"Because, I think if there had been a swing, or something out of the ordinary from either side, I think there would have been trouble."
Hemeyer and Gaffke remember both the patrol and National Guard being a presence on the LU campus for the following week.
The patrol and National Guard also were sent to Kansas City.
But the Jefferson City and Kansas City situations generally were driven by local people, while this month's Ferguson outbreak was different.
"I think many of the people who were arrested, the agitators, were not local, were not from Ferguson," Gaffke noted. "The (local) people there seemed like they wanted peace, they wanted the calm.
"It seems to me that some people took advantage of the situation from outside the area - and were causing the disturbance."
Holland thinks much of the Ferguson turmoil was fueled by the widespread use of social media, and people reacting to rumors without knowing details.
Retired LU theater professor Thomas D. Pawley was attending a drama festival in Kentucky when King was killed and didn't witness the Lincoln students' initial reactions to the assassination or the newspaper columns.
And he had not thought about comparisons with Ferguson until asked about it last week.
"I'm sorry it happened, and I think some good will come out of it," he said.
Pawley added, the frustrations shown during both events - 46-plus years apart - were driven by "an accumulation of things that have been going on and were built up over the years."
Hemeyer said one outcome of the riots after the King assassination was a modernization of training methods for law officers.
"It put police officers in college courses," he said, "and professionalized law enforcement."
Holland agreed, but added that a study he did while still in the National Guard indicated it may be time, again, to update those classes.
"There's a sense where you can suppress any problem," he said. "But when you're dealing with a very large crowd, those tactics can, actually, make the situation worse."