The buried history of Fort Worth's labor struggles
Organized labor is mostly written about as a footnote to the city's past — when it gets acknowledged at all.
Fort Worth is not a name that features prominently in histories of the American labor movement. Within the city’s own collective memory, the story of worker power remains, for now, a counter-history — one that has undoubtedly shaped the city but is not properly recognized in prominent narratives about Fort Worth’s past, which tend to privilege the exploits of “city fathers” and prominent businessmen. This is a shame because a new chapter of this local counter-history is unfolding right now.
As of this writing, journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have been on strike for two weeks. Members of the Fort Worth NewsGuild, which first announced its plans to organize the newspaper in 2020, walked out on Nov. 28 after two years of fighting for a fair contract. They’ve been holding regular pickets near West 7th Street ever since. (I joined them on Wednesday.)
The Star-Telegram’s parent company, McClatchy, responded with bureaucratic savagery by revoking the striking workers’ health care benefits. The newspaper also sought out temporary scab workers to try and break the strike. So far, bargaining sessions between the union and management have gone nowhere — though, on the plus side, the union has raised over $40,000 for its strike fund. (They could still use your support! Please consider donating if you can.)
I already wanted to write about the history of labor in Fort Worth, but the NewsGuild’s strike prompted me to actually start digging. At the very least, I thought I could quickly put together a short list of major strikes to help put the current moment in context. But while I found some promising leads, I also discovered that easily accessible resources are scare. The story of Fort Worth’s labor struggles is still mostly buried in newspaper and union archives, scholarly books, and the memories of workers who participated.
The Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas, perhaps the most comprehensive online resource for Texas history, is an illustrative example. The only mention of “strikes” in the Handbook’s entry on Fort Worth refers to the discovery of oil in the late 1910s, not to organized labor, and the only hint that unions have ever existed in the city is a reference to the lynching of Fred Rouse:
Fort Worth’s most high profile lynching took place in 1921 when Fred Rouse was first beaten, then later pulled from the City County Hospital, and hanged after he crossed a Swift and Company meat-packing house picket line.
(This paltry anecdote also lacks depth and context, like the fact that trade unions in the post-Reconstruction South were either segregated or completely closed to black workers. Could Rouse have really “crossed a picket line” if he couldn’t join the union?)
The Handbook’s entry on Swift & Company makes no mention of either Rouse or the strike. It claims, erroneously, that unionization didn’t reach the Fort Worth Stockyards until the Great Depression — an assertion contradicted by local newspaper archives. Butchers and meat cutters at Swift (and Armour & Company, the city’s other major meatpacking plant) were organizing as early as 1904, when several hundred workers walked out during a national strike against the monopolistic industry.
Meanwhile, the City of Fort Worth’s official history page makes much of the railroad’s importance to the city without mentioning the Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, in which Fort Worth played a pivotal, violent role. According to Walking the Line, a booklet on the history of organized labor in Texas produced by the University of Texas at Arlington’s special collections library:
A shootout . . . virtually terminated the strike in Texas—the Battle of Buttermilk Switch, which occurred in Fort Worth . . . Five riflemen, at least three of whom were sympathizers rather than Knights [of Labor members], challenged a dozen deputies with pistols led by notorious “lawman” Jim Courtright, a recent fugitive from the law. About 100 shots were exchanged, one deputy died, and two on each side were severely wounded.
This is not to say that no resources on Fort Worth’s labor history exist. The city’s public library maintains a partial digital archive of the Fort Worth Labor News, a union-focused newspaper published for several decades in the mid-twentieth century. The International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers District Lodge 776, the local trade union for workers at Lockheed Martin, maintains a history page on its website. Local historian Harold Rich’s books — Fort Worth Between the World Wars (2020) and Fort Worth: Outpost, Cowtown, Boomtown (2014) — contain several anecdotes about early labor struggles, as does the UTA library booklet.
But for a newcomer to Fort Worth lore or a journalist looking for quick historical context on deadline — both of which describe me — there are no easily accessible repositories of local knowledge, only scattered starting points for further research. This aspect of Fort Worth’s history is not well-publicized, to say the least. And without a robust common understanding of the city’s labor struggles, it’s easy to see a strike like that of the Star-Telegram journalists as anomalous or unusual. As support for organized labor hits a 57-year high in the U.S., now seems like an ideal time to begin elevating that history.