By Rosaland TylerAssociate EditorNew Journal and GuideThe Rev. Dr. Martin L. King Jr. was unarmed when he stepped onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where he was shot and killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968.Few could have predicted a single bullet's impact. But the quest for racial equality imperceptibly changed after a single rifle bullet was fired into Dr. King's lower jaw at 6:01 p.m., and he was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. at St. Joseph Hospital in Memphis, according to the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report.The shift from the old to the new Civil Rights Movement did not become evident until about four decades later when another unarmed Black male was shot and killed. This time, the shooting victim was Trayvon Martin, whose killing made headlines in 2012, in Sanford, Fla. Martin, 17, was unarmed, and walking home from a 7-Eleven with a newly purchased bag of Skittles and an iced tea, when he was shot in the chest and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman.“One of the most important things that came out of this tragedy was the activation of an entire new generation of civil rights leaders,” former President Barack Obama said in a February 2022 video, during the tenth anniversary of the shooting death of the younger Martin (not the elder MLK). It was grass roots. It was powered by social media. It was participatory, he said.The legacy is not just outrage, said Obama, who was serving in the White House when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in 2012. I hope it was the start of America looking inward.As the nation observes the King federal holiday on Jan. 16—which would have been Dr. King's 94th birthday (that actually falls on Jan. 15)—it is impossible to overlook the striking similarities that came on the heels of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Trayvon Martin's high-profile shootings. After Dr. King's death on April 4,1968, for example, riots broke out in over 100 American cities. But three days after Dr. King was murdered, Coretta Scott King led thousands of grieving marchers through Memphis, thanks to a controversial court order that U.S. District Judge Bailey Brown had signed on April 5 that permitted the march in Memphis. In keeping with the court order, marchers walked in rows of six, guided by marshals with walkie-talkies. There was no violence.The point is the nation had already arrived at a clear fork in the road the night King was shot and killed. Aiming to pinpoint the shift, Floyd McKissick, director of the Congress of Racial Equality, told The New York Times the night King was shot and killed, “Nonviolence is a dead philosophy and it was not the Black people that killed it. It was the White people that killed nonviolence and White racists at that.”However, two years before he was shot and killed, King sensed that the nation had already arrived at a clear fork in the road. It may be true that the system of segregation is on its deathbed, King said in a 1966 speech at Illinois Wesleyan University. But history has proven that social systems always have a last minute, a strong breathing