It was early in 1941, eight months before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and with World War II already raging overseas, the United States was recruiting young men to serve their country. Hall, a 19-year-old black man from Alabama, had volunteered just a few months earlier. At Fort Benning, he was training for the possibility of fighting overseas in a unit of African American soldiers.

The government never solved his murder.

In their investigations, the FBI and the War Department failed to obtain — and in some cases ignored — critical information about the crime. The investigation report, along with War Department correspondence, raises questions about whether federal authorities were serious about finding his killers. His lynching was an inconvenient reminder of violence against black servicemen at a time when the military was working hard to recruit young men of all races for a looming war.

The FBI compiled a 130-page investigation file, which has never been disclosed publicly until now. In the various reports, correspondence, lab results and photographs that make up this file, there is no record that anyone on base went looking for Hall when he disappeared. Although he appears to have vanished after walking through a white neighborhood on base in the middle of the afternoon, investigators did not identify anyone who could detail his movements. Nor is there any evidence that investigators pursued several accounts that Hall’s white boss at the on-base sawmill had quarreled with him a day earlier and threatened to kill him.