In the midst of the ongoing George Floyd protests sweeping the country, Yusuf Hawkins: Storm over Brooklyn serves as another powerful and harrowing reminder of the unfinished battle for racial justice and equality today.

On August 23, 1989, a Black teen named Yusuf Hawkins and three friends took the subway to the heavily Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to check out a used car for sale. A white mob confronted them, baseball bats in hand. One of the men in the crowd pulled out a gun and shot Hawkins twice in the chest, killing him. Yusuf Hawkins documents both the explicit details of that fateful night as well as the heated events that followed.

Directed in investigative crime procedural fashion by Muta’Ali Muhammad, Yusuf re-creates the night of the murder using the vivid and narrated recollections from those involved, complete with meticulous overhead shots of the place and time of events. The filmmaker interviews Hawkins’s friends who accompanied him that night, his mother, one of the convicted perpetrators, former New York City mayor David Dinkins, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who catalyzed the protests in the murder’s aftermath.

Some of the most disturbing scenes come from the archival footage of Black activists bravely marching through Bensonhurst as they are confronted by violent racist onlookers. In contemporaneous news interviews, white residents victim-blame Hawkins, spit out obscenities—“We’re not racist, we just hate the n——”—and throw bricks and watermelons. In these extremely tense moments, it’s hard to tell whether we’re witnessing the 1980s, the Jim Crow era, or even 2020. Perhaps there is little difference.

Yusuf Hawkins’s murder more thoroughly exposed the deeply rooted racism in Bensonhurst and the white ethnic enclaves of New York City. The film captures this with reserved indignation, fully aware that the fight still rages on today. For this reviewer, Yusuf Hawkins brought up the specious question of whether racial division has really increased in our era. As the film reveals through its deeply personal lens, such division was always seething underneath. It has just erupted more visibly in the social media era for all to see now.