In two of the decade’s most notorious hate crimes, young black men — Michael Griffith in Queens in 1986 and Yusuf Hawkins in Brooklyn three years later — appeared in neighborhoods where they had no obvious connection only to get chased and killed by throngs of mindlessly enraged white boys.

Griffith, who was born in Trinidad and lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was driving with friends on an empty stretch of road late one night just before Christmas, when their car broke down. He and two of the others walked three miles to Howard Beach to get help. Leaving the pizzeria where they had stopped to eat, they were confronted by a mob who beat them. Griffith died running away from them and into a moving car.

Cars, the great American signifiers of social ascension and escape, figured poignantly in these narratives. Hawkins had the misfortune of finding an ad for a used Pontiac he wanted to check out, for sale by an owner in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

Also accompanied by three friends, Hawkins, who was 16 at the time and lived in the largely black neighborhood of East New York, ventured into a white, mostly Italian enclave and was shot. Three days later, hundreds of black protesters who marched through Bensonhurst were met by jeering whites who shouted racial slurs at them.

Another murder which predated these but received considerably less attention has mostly faded from memory and could have been prevented. It follows the same bleak arc.

Three black men, transit workers coming off a shift in Coney Island, late one night in June of 1982, stopped for something to eat. In this instance it was a bagel shop on Avenue X in Gravesend, outside of which a black police officer and another black man, on his way home to Queens one night, had also been attacked not long before.

Driving away from the shop, the men were set upon by white teenagers who taunted and screamed at them: “What are you doing in this area?” The car stalled. The teenagers smashed the windows and began assaulting the men inside. One of the three victims, William Turks, who had moved to New York from Birmingham, Ala., was fatally injured, his body landing on a sewer grate.