DALLAS — Linda and Errol Campbell were in Dallas last week to show relatives from Scotland the spot where history happened – the spot on Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, adjacent to a grassy knoll, where President John Kennedy was shot.

Then history happened again when, on Thursday, five police officers died and seven other officers were wounded in a hail of bullets, just blocks from where Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago.

“I felt that Dallas was healing,” said Linda Campbell, 52, a Houston resident waiting on the steps outside the Sixth Floor Museum for her sister and brother-in-law to finish a tour on Saturday. “I just feel that this put it right back.”

Thursday’s events began during an otherwise peaceful march, in which thousands of protesters marshaled by the Black Lives Matter group took to the streets to demonstrate the recent killings of two African American men at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota.

A shooter reportedly opened fire from above on officers keeping the peace. Police ultimately cornered the shooter – whom they identified as Micah Xavier Johnson – in a parking garage, killing him with a bomb delivered by robot.

The parallels to Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963 were abundantly clear. Both events involved gunmen with military histories who apparently fired from an elevated site within blocks of one another.

Despite the blood-soaked similarities, nobody visiting the quiet, sealed-off streets around the iconic triple underpass and book depository made infamous in 1963 on Saturday was singling out Dallas as a uniquely evil city. 

“It could have happened anywhere,” said Mike Brownlow, 62, who has guided tours of the Kennedy assignation site for 43 years. In 2014, he sang at the funeral of Dallas police officer Bobby Hargis, who rode just feet behind Kennedy’s open car as part of the motorcycle escort when the president was assassinated.

Brownlow also knew Sgt. Michael J. Smith, one of the officers killed in the Thursday melee.

“It was sad,” he said. “His picture is on the front page of the Dallas (Morning) News. … He was going to do 30 years and retire.”

On Saturday, as this sprawling, modern city sweltered in 95-degree heat, Brownlow said things were quieter than usual. A three- or four-block radius around Thursday’s crime scene was closed to motorists and pedestrians.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, Dallas police and county sheriffs vehicles blocked the streets. Officers, alone and in groups, maintained high visibility.

Bill Dobreff, a Detroit trial attorney visiting the Kennedy assassination site, three blocks from the red-brick garage where the police bomb killed Johnson, said he wasn’t stigmatizing Dallas for what happened.

“I love Dallas,” said Dobreff 57, who was in town for a wedding. “This was the work of one insane gunman.”

Across Elm Street, a group of young black men with a bullhorn drew a small crowd.  One of them, Gregory Bernard Smith, said he was in the front lines when a peaceful march was interrupted by bursts of gunfire on Thursday.

On Saturday, Smith, a superintendent for Addison construction, and a group of friends were on the sidewalk, hoping to start a dialogue with passersby about race, policing and justice. 

“We took 10 steps forward, one person took us 35 steps back,” he said. “We need to unify. How all this gets situated is, we start asking each other questions.

“I just hate that the actions of one man can shut down the actions of thousands,” he said.

Smith and his friends weren’t backing down from their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, though they also had positive words for police the who protected marchers amid the violence.

“Maybe we should say ‘black lives matter, too,’ ” said Smith. “Black lives matter, as well.”

His buddy, Greg Williams, 35, a software developer, was ready to engage passersby, too.

He talked about the complexities of being a young black man in a country where another young black man killed five officers, and where earlier police killed black men in high-profile shootings.  

He only had good words about the police in his city, Dallas.

And like many others others across this city again scarred by violence, he said, “It could have happened anywhere.”

Back at the Sixth Floor Museum, which preserves the history of the Kennedy assassination, Errol Campbell reflected on the freshest of the city’s wounds. The shooting of the police officers, he said, will “blight this city for a few years.”

And, it seemed impossible to ignore the similarities between the violence events, more than five decades apart.

“It’s almost as if they’re linked,” he said, “although they’re not.”

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com