Though the FBI and the California Attorney General, and local investigators vowed to continue to probe the causes off their deaths, there was little reason to think that the official verdict on how the men died would change; namely death at their own hands.
Fuller and Harsch died in two areas of Southern California that have been repeated targets of past probes by the FBI, Justice Department, and various local law enforcement agencies, not to mention countless complaints from Black residents in the area, of racially motivated hate crimes.
Presidents, attorneys general, and federal officials wailed that their hands were tied, because it was the job of the states to prosecute the lynch murderers.
The official record still stands that despite the proclaimed national revulsion about America’s hideous lynch history, there is still no federal law on the books that makes lynching a federal hate crime.
Again, America has no official anti-lynching law on the federal books more than one hundred years after the first lynching’s were recorded.
