This memorial will recognize the only documented lynching of a Black person in Fort Worth
December 29,2023
See full Fort Worth Star-Telegram article by Kamal Morgan here.
Fred Rouse III received a phone call in September 2020 with shocking history about his grandfather and namesake: Fred Rouse was lynched in Fort Worth in 1921.
Rouse III, 49, never knew his grandfather on his father’s side of the family. From that phone call, he learned about Rouse and that he represented the only documented lynching of an African American in Fort Worth.
The phone call was from Adam McKinney, who is an advisory board member of the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice. In 2019, Timeka Gordon, another advisory board member of the coalition, had gone to the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. She saw Fred Rouse’s name engraved on one of the monuments representing victims of racial terror lynchings. It said he was killed in Tarrant County.
She came back to Fort Worth and, with the help of the coalition, a nonprofit that creates educational opportunities centered on people of color, began researching Rouse and sought out his relatives.
Rouse III eventually joined, and is now the president of the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, which has worked to create a historical marker and a memorial site recognizing his grandfather.
GRANT PROVIDES FOR LAND PURCHASE
The coalition received a grant from The Rainwater Charitable Foundation to buy the land where Rouse was lynched on the corner of NE 12th Street and Samuels Avenue on the northeast side of downtown Fort Worth. They placed a historical marker on the site and soon will build The Mr. Fred Rouse Memorial.
Rouse III sees value in “a place where there is a piece of remembrance and a solemn place where people can come and go. ... That out of a place of tragedy, there can be resilience and a rejoicing of somebody’s life that ended in a tragedy.”
The design for the memorial was recently submitted and is up for review by Fort Worth’s Development Services. Construction is scheduled to start in late February or early March 2024 and is expected to be completed by December 2024. It will cost about $1.16 million.
The one-third acre site is in the Riverside Gardens Neighborhood. It will have a walking path through it and three 8-by-10-foot panels in the shape of the “death tree,” which is how the Fort Worth Star Telegram described the tree Rouse was hanged from at the time of the lynching. The panels will display the words justice, perseverance, and reckoning. A concrete memorial wall with the image of Fred Rouse II will be at the end of the path. No pictures of Fred Rouse could be found, which will be explained on the wall.
There will pavers recognizing donors, a space for people to pray and heal the land, and a timeline wall explaining the day Rouse was lynched. The back of the wall will have information about the creation of the memorial by the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice.
The area will have a garden path with a variety of hackberry and sycamore trees, black-eye Susans, and autumn joy plants. The area will have benches and two rain gardens designed to collect all of the site’s stormwater run-off.
WHAT HAPPENED TO FRED ROUSE?
In 1921, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, a labor union representing retail and packinghouse workers, called for a national strike for better wages and eight-hour work days.
In cities like Fort Worth, police and strikers clashed. Strikebreakers, those who continued to work during a strike and who were mainly Black, were subjected to violence by strikers.
Fred Rouse was a strikebreaker, a non-union butcher for Swift & Company in the Stockyards. In the Jim Crow South, Black people were not allowed to be members of trade unions.
On Tuesday, Dec. 6, 1921, Rouse was attacked and stabbed repeatedly by strikers when he left work. During the confrontation, two shots were fired that hit brothers Tom and Tracy Maclin. Some believed Rouse fired the gun, but it was never proven. He was beaten until the mob believed he was dead and left him on Exchange Avenue with a fractured skull.
He was taken to the basement of the Negro Ward of the City & County Hospital. On Sunday, Dec. 11, a mob of white men came into the hospital, threatened the staff, and abducted Rouse. They went north to the corner of NE 12th Street and Samuels Avenue, where Rouse was shot several times and hanged.
Rouse was buried in New Trinity Cemetery in Haltom City on Dec. 12. No one was found guilty of Rouse’s death.
A NEW LIFE TRAJECTORY
That phone call in 2020 shifted the trajectory of the life of Rouse’s grandson.
He now travels the country telling his grandfather’s story. The Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice has partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative Community Remembrance Project, which remembers the victims of racial lynching by providing the soil from lynching sites to be exhibited in the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
A clothing line was created that incorporates the pattern of leaves from the hackberry tree Rouse was lynched on.
The Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Legacy of Mr. Fred Rouse was also created and allows guests to go to four sites related to the hanging of Rouse.
Rouse III has gone from a nine to five job in technology to speaking with city leaders to find racial healing in the community.
“My hope for what they will learn and gain is the truth about not only what happened to my grandfather, but what happened to so many others,” Rouse said.