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FORT WORTH’S FORGOTTEN LYNCHING: IN SEARCH OF FRED ROUSE  
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Karen Olsson / Texas Observer
March 18, 2024
Texas Observer
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_ Retracing the steps of a Texan lynched in 1921 requires a trip
through dark days in state history. _

, Texas Observer

 

* _This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a
nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly
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[[link removed]]  __A version of this story ran
in the March / April 2024
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Texas Observer._

They burned his coat before they killed him. This was in Fort Worth,
in 1921, during a strike at a packinghouse: A Black worker, excluded
from the whites-only union, crossed the picket line. After his shift,
he was confronted by white strikers. What I know of the story comes
from century-old newspaper accounts that I suspect may have favored
drama over accuracy; they say the man talked back to the picketers,
was stabbed by one of them, and pulled a gun from the pocket of his
overcoat and shot two people. Then he was badly beaten and left for
dead. Once the police had hauled him off, the man’s attackers, in
the words of the next day’s edition of the _Fort Worth Record_,
“made a bonfire of the Negro’s coat on Exchange Avenue.”

It takes some effort to burn a coat. Hence the bonfire. Although this
is another detail I can’t verify, the coat burning has the
strangeness of truth—of an omen, even. It’s as though the killers
wanted to destroy evidence ahead of time.

To go looking for traces of a person who was lynched is to encounter
one erasure after another, beginning with a bonfire lit one winter
afternoon. I’m tempted to fill in details: the stink of burning
wool, mingled with the packinghouse odors of cowshit and blood. The
flames gobbling up the fabric. A handful of white people lingering
with fists in their pockets, mesmerized by the fire.

But see how quickly I’ve lost track of the man I’m trying to
locate, who disappears along with his coat. 

On a mild fall morning, I make my way to East Exchange Avenue and find
myself on a bluff overlooking the Stockyards. The Swift and Armour
meatpacking plants that once bolstered the city’s status as a center
of the livestock trade are long gone, while the stockyards have become
a tourist attraction. I can hear a guide’s amplified voice, and I
turn to see a group of enormous, old-looking longhorns, white and rust
and brown-colored, being paraded down the brick street, a living
tableau of the men-with-bovines version of Texas history.

I’ve come for a different tour. A bright red Dodge truck pulls up,
and the driver, Fred Rouse, apologizes for “the mess,” which
amounts to one loose water bottle. He’s neatly dressed and speaks in
a soft, calm voice, belying the upheavals he’s weathered since 2020.
His mother died from COVID that year, in August. A month later, he’d
just settled in to watch Game 1 of the NBA finals when a friend he
hadn’t spoken to in many years called and asked whether he could
pass on Rouse’s number to some people he knew. Once connected,
members of a community group called the Tarrant County Coalition for
Peace and Justice [[link removed]] (TCCPJ) started telling Rouse
about a man they said was his grandfather, also named Fred Rouse. Your
grandfather was lynched, they said.

The Fred Rouse who’d been sitting on his couch rooting for the
Lakers figured they’d made a mistake. He was 46 years old, a network
engineer, a father of three. He’d moved to the Dallas area after
college and more recently to a suburb of Fort Worth. His dad had died
when he was 12, and he’d never known anything about his dad’s
dad—not even his first name—but this story about a lynching
didn’t line up. As far as he knew, he didn’t have any family in
town. Then the callers identified his mother and father and siblings.
They verified other things he knew to be true of his family, and he
was convinced: On December 11, 1921, his grandfather had been dragged
from a hospital room where he was recovering from a beating and hanged
from a hackberry tree on Samuels Avenue.

“It was like, ‘All right, that’s not really something I wanted
to hear four weeks after my mom died,’” says Rouse. Yet soon, he
was in touch with a cousin in Fort Worth he’d never known, and he
joined the TCCPJ. He became Fred Rouse III. Now he is helping to
create a memorial to his grandfather and contributing to another
project, one that will turn what was once a Ku Klux Klan headquarters
into the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing.

In a city that has traditionally identified itself with nostalgic
legends of cowboys and pioneers and oilmen, these efforts to
commemorate the first Fred Rouse, Tarrant County’s sole documented
Black lynching victim, aim to make visible some of what those legends
obscured. Even more ambitiously, they intend to seek solace through
art and architecture and landscaping and community, to reckon with
horror and death in beautiful new spaces.

As we look down at the Stockyards, Rouse points to the spot where his
grandfather was first beaten up, then to the old streetcar tracks
embedded in the brick. His grandfather had a chance to escape by
boarding a car, Rouse says. He was denied entrance by the conductor,
though, and fell into the hands of the mob. The _Record_ would report
that “his face has been beaten almost into a jelly, and his body is
bruised and filled with holes.”

Nostalgia, according to one theory, helped fuel the wave of lynchings
in Texas during the 1910s and early 1920s. Violence had long been seen
as necessary for white people’s survival and prosperity here,
whether through fights with Native Americans, the stringing up of
suspected cattle thieves, wars against Mexico and the Northern United
States, or assaulting abolitionists and, later, carpetbaggers. Killing
was established as a ritual of manhood, historian William Carrigan has
argued, and in the modern era, lynching became a callback to the
violent frontier past.

“We have no idea about the ghosts that are walking the streets of
Tarrant County.”

In the immediate wake of the Civil War, many whites were lynched, but
by the close of the nineteenth century, lynching victims were
overwhelmingly Black and their murders were turned into entertainment.
The most notorious such spectacle was the 1916 lynching of Jesse
Washington in Waco
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which drew more than 10,000 people to witness a “feeble-minded”
17-year-old be dragged, beaten, stabbed, doused in oil, amputated and
castrated, then slowly lowered onto a fire. Here the language
typically used to characterize lynchings—as racial terror, as a form
of social control—doesn’t really seem adequate. Terrorism has a
twisted logic to it; this was much more deranged, a collective
sociopathic turn. Sadism as a pastime.

There will never be an accurate tally of Texas lynchings, says Jeffrey
Littlejohn, a history professor at Sam Houston State University who
maintains a website, Lynching in Texas, with a map-based interface of
known killings. “People will call me and say ‘I have this story, I
can’t really confirm it,’ and then you look into it and you
can’t really confirm it, either,” he says. To date, he and his
students have documented more than 600 Texas lynchings, and in 75
percent of those, the victims were Black men. 

“I want people to understand that these events happened in their
communities, cities, counties,” Littlejohn says. “People were
reading about them in the newspapers. Lynching is mixed right in there
with what the federal government was doing, what bills had passed,
what wars were being fought abroad, what the corn and cotton prices
were, and here’s a big story about someone who was burned at the
stake on a square in Conroe.”

From the Stockyards, Rouse drives us to our next stop. He’s leading
me through the TCCPJ’s Fred Rouse Memorial Tour (originally
developed by DNAWORKS, an arts group, as the Fort Worth Lynching Tour)
which guides visitors through the events of his grandfather’s final
days. We park behind an office building downtown, which a century ago
was the hospital where the police brought Rouse once they realized he
was still alive. The Negro ward was located in the basement. I picture
a sort of subterranean field hospital, people languishing on cots in a
continual twilight, while one of them, a man with a ruined face who
wasn’t supposed to survive, is somehow clawing his way back to life.

The building is now part of the Bass Performance Hall complex, but
high above the entrance, the words “City & County Hospital” are
engraved in stone. Earlier I spoke by phone with Timeka Gordon, who
grew up on the east side of Fort Worth and is now the director of the
Intercultural Center at Texas Christian University, as well as a
member of TCCPJ. She helped develop the tour, and when she first came
to the hospital site and saw the inscription, she told me, “I lost
it. Here we are in downtown Fort Worth, a place I had visited so many
times as an adult and as a child. I’ve learned about everything
else, and never did I learn about this man and what happened here. We
have no idea about the ghosts that are walking the streets of Tarrant
County.”

Thanks to the TCCPJ, a local marker program, and cooperative property
owners, there’s now a sign outside the building that tells of how
Rouse was abducted from the hospital: Late at night on the fifth day
of his convalescence, a group of men barged into the Negro ward and
demanded he be turned over to them.

Fred Rouse III stands over the sign and reads a line out loud: “When
the nurse called their attention to the fact that he had no clothes,
they jokingly replied that ‘he would not need any.’” The men
dragged him away and ferried him north, headed for a tree where a
white man had been hanged the year before.

In 2019, Gordon took a group of TCU students to Montgomery, Alabama,
to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, established by
the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). There, more than 800
hanging steel pillars represent counties where lynchings occurred, the
victims’ names etched in the metal. On the way, Gordon was contacted
by a TCU colleague, who asked her to look for a particular name, Fred
Rouse. It was the first Gordon had heard of him. “I was dead set on
looking for the pillar. I became all-consumed, and my students did as
well,” she says. They found the marker with Rouse’s name on it.
“We were determined when we got back to TCU to research this man.”

The professor who’d contacted her, Adam McKinney, had already begun
that research, prompted by a column in the _Fort Worth Star-Telegram_
about the Tarrant County pillar. With others they formed the TCCPJ,
its mission to memorialize Rouse and to spark broader conversations
about race. The group raised enough money to purchase a plot of land
at Samuels Avenue and NE 12th Street, where Rouse was hanged from a
hackberry limb.

It would’ve been close to midnight by the time the men brought Rouse
there to what was known as the death tree. Word spread quickly, and a
mob of dozens, maybe as many as a hundred white people, left their
beds to watch the hanging. Afterward some in the mob fired shots at
his dead body; others threw rocks.

The tree was chopped down three days later. Two policemen and a
railroad employee would be charged with murder, but the cases were
eventually dropped.

The corner of Samuels Avenue and NE 12th Street is now part of an
industrial zone bordered by railroad tracks and a thoroughfare. Rouse
and I head there and walk onto a spit of grass that sits next to a
window-cleaning business and across from a huge lot where
semi-trailers are docked at a warehouse. Back-up alarms pierce the air
over the rumbling and whining of motors. In addition to purchasing the
land, the TCCPJ worked with EJI to install a commemorative marker, and
hired a design firm to plan a memorial at the site.

There are no trees on the land now, which makes it all the harder to
picture what occurred a century ago. The dreary environment around it,
with its expanses of concrete, its corrugated flex-space buildings and
relentless engines, is so familiar—we’ve all passed through a
zillion ugly, paved-over places like this, wrecked for the sake of
shipping and logistics and whatever else—and I remember that it’s
not just the cows-and-oil version of history that hides the past from
us.

For Fred Rouse III, the twists of fate that brought him to this spot
seem so improbable as to suggest some larger force at work. On the
hundredth anniversary of the lynching, the TCCPJ and others held a
ceremony for the marker’s unveiling, and Rouse addressed the
gathered crowd. Now he recalls some of the speech for me: “One
hundred years ago today, my grandfather’s blood was shed on this
land, but 100 years later, his blood came back, his flesh came back,
and his name came back.” Rouse is still amazed by this. 

“When I was standing there giving that speech, it was like I was on
a mountaintop,” he says. “All the things that had to happen, to
put me there a hundred years later, to the day. I can’t even
describe the feeling.”

Both the Fred Rouse memorial and the planned arts space are meant to
be sites of community healing. Wondering what that could look like, I
talk to Diane Jones Allen, principal landscape architect at
DesignJones, which designed the memorial. Previously she and a team
designed the Tamir Rice Memorial in Cleveland, and in both projects,
questions about how to balance trauma with beauty and tranquility have
played out in practical, material decisions. For the Rouse memorial,
moreover, “It’s an industrial zone, that was our challenge,” she
told me.

In the final design, three steel panels with tree-shaped openings
serve as thresholds for visitors to pass through before arriving at a
wall of remembrance. Plants will surround the path and fill the space
between the memorial and the window cleaning company. In the
renderings, the cutouts in the panels seem to make the absence of the
hackberry tree visible, a jagged hole, and I can see how these
nontrees might serve as a kind of portal. Walk through them and
discover what happened.

Rouse’s story had been largely forgotten in Fort Worth before the
EJI lynching memorial revived it, yet there are some people who knew
about Rouse all along. One is Sandy Joyce, editor of _La Vida News:
The Black Voice_, a weekly paper founded in 1957. Joyce grew up in
Fort Worth, occasionally accompanying her mother to her job as a maid
for a wealthy white family, and attended I.M. Terrell High School,
which was the Black high school when the school district was
segregated. She then left for Columbia University and lived in New
York for 27 years before returning to Fort Worth in the mid-1990s.

Joyce went to a meeting that DesignJones held for community members,
she says, and came away with mixed feelings. “I told them, ‘This
is really not as successful as it could be, because these people [at
the meeting] don’t know [the location] where you’re talking
about’”—and not just because the site is in a warehouse zone.
Fort Worth has always been the kind of place where people on the south
side often didn’t know much about the north side, and vice versa,
Joyce told me, and that makes it harder to define the community of
interest for the memorial.

After Rouse’s tour I meet up with her, and she guides me around the
Southside, a historic middle-class Black neighborhood of frame houses
and wide avenues. She gestures toward old clubs that have closed and
old churches that are still going and a popular Jamaican restaurant.
Then we stop at a public library branch, one that Joyce and other
activists had fought to have built. She shows me the community room,
lined with old photos of schoolchildren in all-Black classrooms, and
names some of the teachers. While she never says it outright, I
believe she’s trying to help me at least glimpse the larger arc of
Black history in the city, to make sure I see more than the lynching.

Just up the street from the library is Evans Avenue Plaza, built in
the early 2000s, where stone rectangles embedded in the brick
commemorate notable events in local African-American history. One of
the plaques, for instance, notes that in 1919, a Black branch of the
YMCA was established in Tarrant County, and in 1920, African American
voters helped implement a city mayor form of government, and in 1921,
Fred Rouse was lynched for crossing a picket line. Here, it seems,
Rouse was remembered quietly, locally, as part of a broader history.
Worthy as it is to commemorate what happened to him in a larger way,
to tell his story to people across Fort Worth and beyond, I can see
how, for someone who’s lived with this knowledge for a long
time—and who’s seen her share of well-meaning groups try to do
things that die on the vine—the memorial project might elicit a more
cautious kind of support.

Another project, the arts center named for Fred Rouse, is much bigger
in scale than the memorial, a collaboration among multiple groups
who’ve banded together under the name Transform 1012 N. Main Street.
The design for the space is still in progress, but the idea is to
renovate and repurpose a huge abandoned building at 1012 N. Main
Street that was originally a KKK auditorium seating 4,000 people. Its
size speaks to the Klan’s power in Fort Worth in 1924, when
construction started. Two years earlier, the same year that a grand
jury failed to indict the suspects in Rouse’s murder, candidates
affiliated with the Klan won every state and local race on the Fort
Worth ballot, as well as one of Texas’ Senate seats.

This, however, was a high-water mark for the Klan in north Texas and
elsewhere. The local chapter only held on to the building for a few
years. It was then briefly a department store, then a boxing arena,
and for a long time, a pecan factory—a sign reading Ellis Pecan Co.
is still attached to the facade. (Occasionally a young Sandy Joyce
would go there with her grandmother, who would sell the nuts from her
pecan trees when she needed cash for a project.) It had been sitting
vacant and was slated for demolition when the Transform 1012 coalition
acquired it.

Bizarrely, the magician Harry Houdini performed there in 1926, while
it was a KKK auditorium. Born in Hungary and the son of a rabbi,
Houdini must’ve been pretty hard up to hire himself out to a group
that was, among other things, antiimmigrant and anti-Jewish. In
rooting around online, I don’t find anything about the show itself,
but I do come across an account of another visit by Houdini to Fort
Worth, a few years earlier, in which he was tied up and dragged behind
a motorcycle, hung upside down, and made to escape from shackles. All
of it sounds eerily familiar, as though Houdini fashioned a kind of
performance art out of the materials of racist crimes. (This, some
further searching reveals, is not a new idea in the world of Houdini
specialists, but it was new to me.)

By the time of his second show, Houdini was on a mission to debunk
charlatans posing as Spiritualist mediums, who claimed they could
receive messages from deceased loved ones. His tour slogan, in 1926,
was “Can the Dead Speak to the Living?” His answer was an
unequivocal “no.”

In a book the TCCPJ produced for the 2021 centenary, the authors
repurposed Houdini’s question. Can the dead speak to the living? Can
Fred Rouse speak to us? In large part, that’s what these projects, a
memorial and the reinvention of a building, are asking.

The power of the lynching tour, which may eventually be true of a
visit to the memorial garden and the arts center, lies in their
physicality, in how you progress through space as you learn what
happened. The tour asks you to sit with—or walk with—the story in
a slower, deeper way than if you were to just read it on a historical
marker. It’s not that the journey puts you in Rouse’s place,
rather it places Rouse.

In the beginning, it frustrated me that Rouse will always remain
faceless—that we don’t know more about him, that even the
particulars of the lynching story are elusive, drawn from old
newspaper accounts. Yet this staging of his last days gives him a kind
of shape, like the cutout of a tree that no longer grows. He becomes
an absence we might walk through, toward a truth that will never quite
let us catch up to it, partial, terrible, halfway paved-over but still
at hand, still with us.

* lynchings
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* texas
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* History
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