...In 2014, Northeastern University Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which seeks to uncover details of racially motivated murders during the Jim Crow era, began digging up documents on Hall’s case. Those documents were turned over to Northeastern’s School of Journalism, prompting a year-long investigation into the lynching and the government’s failure to see justice done. This article is based on the FBI file, a separate War Department report and correspondence, a 500-page file maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and other government records, as well as a range of archival documents and interviews with people who were at Fort Benning at the time of Hall’s death or otherwise knew him, and their descendants.
Seventy-five years after Hall’s life was cut short, Americans are wrestling again with questions about the value placed on the lives of young black men and the ability of the criminal justice system to transcend its historic double standard. Hall’s case may be cold, but it still resonates....
Washington Post