Retracing the steps of a Texan lynched in 1921 requires a trip through dark days in state history.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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