You should remember Fred Rouse today
He was lynched 102 years ago.
Last year, I joined a ceremony to celebrate the life of Fred Rouse, a local black man who was lynched by a white mob on December 11, 1921. The gathering, organized by the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, was well-attended. Many, including Fort Worth City Council members and a representative from a local congressman’s office, spoke about the need to remember and learn from racist violence of the past.
But it was Rouse’s grandson, Fred Rouse III, who spoke most eloquently. He talked to the crowd about the tree from which his grandfather was hanged, the tree of systemic racism, and its bitter fruit:
I want to tell America: You may have taken the rope off our necks but the tree is still standing.
When I talk about the tree, I'm talking about the tree of systemic racism that has taken root in this country and all over the world. I'm talking about the tree that has beared the fruits of injustice and bigotry throughout America.
We can't even sit in our own car and eat McDonald's without someone opening the car door and shooting us into the car. Remember Erik Cantu.
The tree is still standing.
We can't even be unarmed at a gas station without someone walking up to us and shooting us four times for no reason. Remember Jonathan Price.
The tree is still standing.
We have to wait almost three years for a trial to begin when someone shoots us through a window at our own home. Remember Atatiana Jefferson.
The tree is still standing.
I don’t have any deep historical insight to offer today. There’s a lot that could be said about how this past injustice isn’t really past and how most of Fort Worth has yet to even learn about Fred Rouse, much less engage meaningfully with the city’s legacy of racist violence. But I mostly just didn’t want to let this day — the 102nd anniversary of his killing — pass without comment.
If you’ve never done so, you should visit the memorial site for yourself, which sits at the corner of Northeast 12th Street and Samuels Avenue. Here’s the text of the historical marker, which is worth reading in full:
On December 11, 1921, Mr. Fred Rouse, a Black citizen, husband, father, and non-union butcher at Swift & Co. meatpacking, was lynched at this site by a white mob. Five days prior, he was beaten on Exchange Avenue in the Stockyards by a mob of meatpackers from a whites-only union who were picketing Swift & Co. After stabbing, then bludgeoning him with a nearby streetcar guardrail, the mob believed that they had murdered Mr. Rouse. Niles City police officers asked the agitated mob to relinquish Mr. Rouse’s body to them. They placed his body in the back of a police car, and after realizing that he was alive, drove him to the City & County Hospital Negro Ward at E. 4th and Jones Streets. At 11 pm on December 11, another white mob abducted Mr. Rouse from the hospital and drove him down Samuels Avenue to this site. Twenty minutes later, he was hanged from a hackberry tree and his body was riddled with bullets. A bloody pistol was found under his feet. During this era, Black workers like Mr. Rouse were regularly excluded from union membership, denied worker protections, and often faced hostile contempt and lethal violence from white workers seeking to maintain economic control. Three white men were charged in the murder of Mr. Rouse, including the acting Niles City police chief and another officer. All were acquitted. No one has ever been held accountable. Memorializing Mr. Fred Rouse reminds us to remain vigilant in pursuit of racial justice.
I was hoping there would be another ceremony or some other public acknowledgement of Fred Rouse’s lynching in 2023. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been and won’t be. I emailed the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice last week to ask whether they were planning any such event, but never heard back. The Transform 1012 N. Main Street project, which is working to rehabilitate the North Side’s decrepit former Ku Klux Klan hall into a community center that bears Fred Rouse’s name, also doesn’t seem to have planned anything and hasn’t posted publicly about the anniversary of his death.
There is still, as far as I know, an ongoing plan to develop the site of Rouse’s lynching and turn it into a park. If you visit the historical marker now, you’ll also see a sign with plans for the park, a design based on the community’s input, though there are no indications that work has started yet. (Here’s a link to a rendering of what the park might look like when finished.)
I don’t think Fred Rouse is in danger of being forgotten, but if Fort Worth is ever going to move forward, we’ll need to keep talking about him. We’ve got a long way to go before we manage to achieve anything substantial like, say, a program of reparations for wrongs done to the black community or a sustained public investment in 76104, which still has the lowest life expectancy of any ZIP code in Texas.
Rouse’s grandson said last year that the tree is still standing and, when it comes to Fort Worth, I see no reason to disbelieve him.
