Many people saw more than the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery's life when a video emerged this week of white men armed with guns confronting the black man, a struggle with punches thrown, three shots fired and Arbery collapsing dead.
The February 23 shooting in coastal Georgia is drawing comparisons to a much darker period of US history when extrajudicial killings of black people, almost exclusively at the hands of white male vigilantes, inflicted racial terror on African Americans.
It frequently happened with law enforcement complicity or feigned ignorance.
The footage of Arbery's death was not the only thing that rattled the nation's conscience.
It took more than two months for his pursuers who told police they suspected he was a burglar to be arrested and taken into custody.
That is fuelling calls for the resignation of local authorities who initially investigated the case and reforms of Georgia's criminal justice system.
The modern-day lynching of Mr. Arbery is yet another reminder of the vile and wicked racism that persists in parts of our country, said the Rev. James Woodall, state president of the Georgia NAACP.
The slothfulness and inaction of the judicial system, in this case, is a gross testament to the blatant white racial privileges that permeates throughout our country and our institutions."
"Another black life has been taken by a bullet and the slaying justified by white fear."