Investigations
No law enforcement agency of the era formally investigated Gaines' disappearance. It had not been reported to any of them, and many African Americans distrusted the police. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who took a very suspicious view of the civil rights movement, wrote in an internal memo in 1940 that he did not believe the case fell under the FBI's jurisdiction.
With the onset of World War II, other concerns displaced the Gaines case for most of the 1940s. The only other official record relating to the case released by the FBI was a 1970 letter from Hoover to an unidentified member of the public, thanking them for their interest in the case but reiterating his position from 30 years earlier that he did not believe the FBI had any jurisdiction to investigate. Two media outlets looked into the case a half-century apart, Ebony in the 1950s and The Riverfront Times in the 2000s.
Read more about this topic: Lloyd L. Gaines