Fred Rouse will be memorialized in Fort Worth this week, exactly 100 years after a mob lynched him.
Rouse between the Civil War and World War II.
In 1921, workers in the Stockyards were on strike. Meatpacking companies hired non-union workers like Rouse to replace them.
Newspaper accounts at the time claimed that during a clash outside the packinghouses, Rouse shot and injured two white strikers. A mob beat Rouse, and he spent several days recuperating in the segregated basement ward of the county hospital.
Then, on Dec. 11, another mob kidnapped him, brought him to a tree off Samuels Avenue, and hanged and shot him.
A historical marker will soon stand at Rouse鈥檚 death site. The Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice (TCCPJ), a nonprofit dedicated to memorializing victims of racial violence, , exactly 100 years after his killing.
鈥淚n perpetuity, Mr. Fred Rouse will not be forgotten,鈥� said Adam W. McKinney, the president of the TCCPJ.
The TCCPJ also plans to develop the site around the memorial, which is currently an empty lot. McKinney said they鈥檝e hired a design firm, and they plan to ask for neighborhood input about what to turn the space into.
The TCCPJ has a full week of events planned to honor Rouse, including a prayer vigil and a march. Before the memorial plaque goes up off of Samuels Avenue on Saturday, a historical marker will also be placed in front of the old hospital Rouse was abducted from. That hospital building downtown.
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