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Can a Lynching Spark Change?

Fred Rouse died at the hands of a mob in 1921. Now Adam W. McKinney leads a drive for reconciliation and remembrance.

By TCU Magazine

by Brandon Kitchin

No one alive remembers details of Fred Rouse’s life, but today we can imagine. Likely born to parents who had been enslaved in Mississippi, Rouse moved to Fort Worth in the 1910s. As gruesome as his butchering job at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant probably was, the paycheck was an opportunity to provide for his family — a wife and three children, including a newborn son bearing his name.

Rouse couldn’t join Swift’s white employees when they went on strike in 1921. Black laborers were not permitted to be members of unions but, like Rouse, they were often called on to fill in for the jobs vacated by strikers. His decision to work led to his abduction and lynching.

After a few brief newspaper articles about the crime, culminating in an announcement that no one would be tried, Rouse and his story were largely forgotten, muffled by the noise of an evolving Cowtown.

A century later, Fred Rouse’s name is getting dignity and recognition, thanks to the work of Adam W. McKinney.

Identity, liberation and civil rights are central points of the many social justice projects helmed by McKinney, an assistant professor of dance at TCU. Using his body as a means for performative expression, the former member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater explores the many tentacles of racial trauma and launches initiatives that aim to heal.

If his work means digging up old and painful injuries, McKinney said, it is worthwhile. Otherwise, those wounds will continue to fester: “We must look back to history to examine the effects of historical oppressions on our communities in order to develop creative solutions that lead to personal and communal action.”

His solutions for reconciliation include a personal genealogical film, a community justice organization and, in Fort Worth, an augmented reality-enhanced tour of the sites associated with the crimes against Rouse and an attempt to reclaim a former Ku Klux Klan hall he envisions converting into a community arts center.

In 2006, while living in New York, McKinney and his now-husband, Daniel Banks, co-founded DNAWORKS, an arts-based social justice and service organization. To date, it has led workshops and/or produced dance, theater and film programs in 37 states and 17 countries. Under their co-direction, the group is growing roots in Fort Worth.

Adam W. McKinney is part of a coalition that wants to purchase a Fort Worth building constructed in 1924 for the Ku Klux Klan and turn it into the Fred Rouse Center and Museum for Arts and Community Healing. Photo by Rodger Mallison

“One of the things DNAWORKS has gotten really good at is planning our programming around what we’re hearing, feeling and sensing,” Banks said. “This moment is a reckoning for Fort Worth as we continue to grow and advertise ourselves as one of the top hot cities to move to in the country. … The question is: What role does social justice and awareness of histories of racism play in the growth of this city and in the expanding profile of the city?”

The history exists, even if the awareness often lags.

When McKinney moved to Texas in 2016 to teach at TCU, he wanted to know about the history of racism in Cowtown. In the search, he came across the long-buried Rouse tragedy in an archival Fort Worth Star-Telegram story.

Though the story of Rouse’s killing is old, the wounds felt fresh to McKinney.

“The way he died and the way the city just ignored it is indicative of the fact that people are still fighting for justice,” said Kyev Tatum, a pastor and community activist in Fort Worth.

McKinney said he was not surprised that the city’s current residents had little to no knowledge about Rouse’s death. “That’s by design,” he said. “The reason we don’t know about this atrocity is because we don’t centralize Blackness. We don’t centralize Black stories, and that is connected to a long history of racism, racial terror, violence and the legislation to support that trauma.”

Unearthing old, unaddressed wounds isn’t easy. The work is labor-intensive and emotionally taxing, but McKinney, Banks and their collaborators are committed to helping the city learn and heal from its hard historical truths.

Music by Jordan Jones

The massive Swift and Co. meatpacking plant opened in Fort Worth in 1903. Slaughterhouse companies were the targets of labor reform movements across the country in the early 1900s. Courtesy of Tarrant County College District Archives.

Lynching

In the early 1900s, Fort Worth was the Texas capital of the booming meatpacking industry, as well as the state’s railroad hub. The slaughterhouses lured new residents to the growing city, but the plants were hot zones for battles between laborers and wealthy corporations.

The organized labor movement launched a national strike in 1921 to advocate for better pay and working conditions in meatpacking plants. That December, unionized employees in Fort Worth walked out and formed picket lines.

Swift & Co. hired Black laborers to do the work instead. Although Rouse could not have joined the strike because of his skin color, he was nevertheless harassed as he walked through lines of angry pickets on his way to and from work.

As he headed home on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 1921, he was accosted by white strikers.

One threatened Rouse, telling him to tread carefully or he might not be coming back to work the next day, to which Rouse replied, “I’ll be back at 7 o’clock in the morning.”

The threat proved to be the true statement.

A scuffle broke out, and the men began to beat Rouse. Someone pulled a gun and fired, injuring two men — an act that was blamed on Rouse. As police made their way in, they were overwhelmed by the mob stomping, stabbing and beating Rouse with whatever was at hand, including an iron bar torn from a nearby streetcar.

But Rouse survived.

After regaining consciousness on the way to a morgue, he was transported to the segregated Negro section in the basement of City-County Hospital, where he lay in recovery for five days. Around 10 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 11, more than 30 men arrived and demanded Rouse be remanded to them. In attempting to locate their victim, the men first tried to kidnap the wrong patient; only by feeling Rouse’s fractured skull were they able to identify their target.

The abductors took Rouse to a hackberry tree at the intersection of Northeast 12th Street and Samuels Avenue and lynched him. His naked, bullet-filled body was found hanging with a bloody gun underneath. A blocklong parade of gawkers drove by before undertakers cut down the body.

He was buried the next day at New Trinity Cemetery. A headstone has not been located. The death tree was uprooted a few days later.

Rouse’s age at death is still in question. His death certificate gives his birth year as 1868, making him 53, but his World War I draft card, which he would have personally filled out, lists his birth year as 1888, making him 33.

Though his beginnings are a mystery, the cruelty of his end is a fact.

Prosecutors convened two grand juries to address the crime. The first failed to indict three men, including two police officers from Niles City, the 1-square-mile tax haven in what is now the Stockyards. Months later, a second grand jury did indict the three men and three more on charges of murder, but in the end, no one was ever tried.

Rouse’s death shattered his family, altering its trajectory for at least a generation.

Following the lynching, Rouse’s widow, Eula Mae, was left to fend for herself with little income and three children in tow. She kept the older son, Jesse, with her in Fort Worth and sent the two youngest, Annie Bell and newborn Fred Jr., to be raised by relatives in the East Texas city of Palestine.

Fred Rouse III's grandfather and uncle are buried at the New Trinity Cemetery in Haltom City, Texas, but no headstones for them have been located. Photo by Rodger Mallison

As Fred Rouse Jr. grew up and had children of his own, he never spoke of his father, if he even knew about what had happened to him. “I don’t know if it was because they didn’t know,” said Fred Rouse III, who now lives in the Fort Worth suburb of Mansfield, “or my dad just didn’t talk a lot about it.”

A century later, Fred Rouse III enjoys a much better quality of life than his grandfather was afforded. He, too, is a married father. He works as a senior systems administrator and network engineer for a Dallas capital management company. He and his siblings, Richard and LaFonda Rouse, did not learn of their grandfather’s fate until 2020 as a result of McKinney’s efforts.

On This Earth

On Dec. 11, 2019, the 98th anniversary of Rouse’s death, the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, of which McKinney is co-founder and president, held a soil collection ceremony at the lynching site. Inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, the coalition “seeks to remember by honoring victims of oppression and reflect more accurately on the history of racial terror and violence in Tarrant County,” according to its website.

Tatum, who was born blocks away from the location, said the prayer eulogizing Rouse at the ceremony.

Rouse “did not leave us a lot of money or material things, but he left us a memory of a Black man who decided to challenge the system and go to work for his family, and it cost him his life,” Tatum said. “So while we mourn Brother Fred and it’s all right for us to cry, we cannot sit by and allow the hatred to continue to fester in our hearts simply because of the color of our skin. No, no, Brother Fred was not a strikebreaker, but Brother Fred was a truth maker.”

A jar of soil from Fred Rouse’s lynching site joined hundreds of others at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Glen E. Ellman

The Equal Justice Initiative found that more than 4,400 African American men, women and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Courtesy of Equal Justice Initiative/Human Pictures

All in attendance at the soil collection were encouraged to participate in the digging. Together they collected two jars of soil from where the death tree once stood. They sent one jar to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum, where it joined almost 280 other jars of soil taken from sites of race-based murders across the South. The National Lynching Memorial, as it’s also known, honors the lives of more than 4,400 African American men, women and children who were documented victims of lynching in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950.

The other jar is on tour around Fort Worth to spread awareness of the century-old crime and remind people of what happened on the ground beneath their feet.

The coalition is working to install historical markers in honor of Rouse.

In January, the group purchased the Samuels Avenue land (with a grant from partnering organization the Rainwater Charitable Foundation) and is reclaiming it as Fred Rouse Memorial Park. The group also hopes to place a marker in the Stockyards and is in contact with Performing Arts Fort Worth about the possibility of installing another at the former City-County Hospital.

A pillar for Tarrant County, Texas, bears the name of Fred Rouse at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Courtesy of Timeka Gordon

Remembering Fred Rouse

DNAWORKS, the initiative co-founded by McKinney and Banks, is pursuing multiple artistic avenues to breathe new life into the long-buried story.

McKinney has commissioned songs, created films and choreographed dances in honor of the man who died on Samuels Avenue. The works aim to make audiences feel emotionally and visually connected to Rouse. The professor hopes the artistic experience will humanize the victim.

“There’s no better way to do that than using the arts to leverage these conversations,” McKinney said. “There is power in the arts, and that needs to be used as a central force toward reconciliation and liberation.”

"Brick by Brick" by Edyka Chilomé

Video by Will Wilson

Dance by Adam W. McKinney

In one short film, McKinney re-creates 1921 visually with tintype photography and edited film to transport viewers back in time. In Unfolding History, the professor poses as Rouse: With gun in hand, he dances in an apron, an article of clothing in the spirit of what the butcher might have worn.

“My goal as an artist is to fill in the holes of history,” McKinney said. “And because I haven’t been able to locate any photos of Mr. Rouse, I’ve decided to place my body in the center of inquiry as a way to confuse the viewer into thinking I have transported my body 100 years earlier, making connections between historical and contemporary anti-Black racial violence.”

DNAWORKS’ Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse is another facet of the initiative. It launched in early December and continued from March through May.

Part bicycle and car tour, part immersive dance and theater performance, the tour takes participants in reverse direction, starting at the tree, through several sites associated with the murder.

Ending the tour at the tree would be “unfair for Mr. Rouse,” Banks said. “Why would we reiterate the progression of this violent act over and over again on this tour? Obviously, I’m not naïve. I don’t believe that we are physically setting him free, but I do believe we can symbolically free his spirit from this violence.”

Participants may join The Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse by bicycle or car. Photo by Rodger Mallison

Tour participants reflect at the site of the former City-County Hospital in downtown Fort Worth. A separate staircase still leads to a basement level, which was a segregated Negro ward from which Fred Rouse was kidnapped. Photo by Glen E. Ellman

If and when the City of Fort Worth completes its ambitious Panther Island development project, the former Ku Klux Klan building will face the Trinity River diversion channel. Photo by Glen E. Ellman

The interactive FWLT app allows people on the tour to see the Death Tree as it once stood on the corner of NE 12th Street and Samuels Avenue in Fort Worth. The app, accessible from anywhere, includes music and historical elements. Photo by Glen E. Ellman

The last stop on the tour is the former Klavern No. 101, built on North Main Street in 1924. Photo by Trisha Spence

Using an augmented reality app launched in memory of the 99th anniversary of the crime, viewers can visualize Rouse’s story from anywhere, though visiting the actual locations will trigger expanded content.

“The goal of the app is to practice how we can embody anti-racism,” McKinney said. “Once we get to a site, we pull up articles and historical photographs. For example, at the Stockyards, we move the mob away from Rouse so that he can walk home to his family.”

Lauren Huynh, a senior ballet and modern dance major, said the concept of an alternate history makes an impact.

“It’s turning back time and saying, ‘What if this hadn’t happened?’ ” said Huynh, who joined DNAWORKS as a production assistant for the project to help coordinate fundraising, sponsorships, choreography and event logistics. “That creates space for really difficult conversations, and that’s exactly what needs to happen when we talk about our history and America’s entrenchment in racism.”

On the tour, participants also visit the site of the Swift & Co. plant, City-County Hospital and other significant locations. Along the journey, McKinney and DNAWORKS staff and volunteers point out the physical scars of racism in Fort Worth.

One point of interest is the empty space where a Confederate monument long stood outside of the Tarrant County Courthouse. It was removed in June 2020 after George Floyd’s death sparked demands for change. Tour organizers also stop to show how Interstate 35 tore a gash through the center of the city, separating historic Black communities.

Adam W. McKinney’s DNAWORKS and a coalition of supporters are working to purchase a former Ku Klux Klan hall and repurpose it. Acquisition and repairs would cost close to $4 million. Photo by Rodger Mallison

Physical Reconciliation

DNAWORKS has joined forces with six other local organizations for another ambitious objective: to acquire an abandoned building near downtown, a structure that a century ago served an infamous purpose.

“Fort Worth had one of the largest Ku Klux Klan memberships in the 1920s,” McKinney said. He believes more than 6,000 people belonged to the city’s chapter at its peak.

Originally built in 1924, KKK Klavern No. 101 may be the only remaining building in the country built for the white supremacist group. After the hall caught fire in 1924, members rebuilt it, and it remained the headquarters for the local chapter until 1931.

After the group dissipated, the building served multiple purposes, most recently as an Ellis Pecan Co. warehouse. The structure has been vacant since 2004.

In 2020, new owners received city approval to demolish the building, but they were stalled by a 180-day delay approved by the city’s Historic and Cultural Landmarks Committee at the request of DNAWORKS and other supporters who want to keep it standing. If the arts group can acquire the hall — an initiative the current building owners are receptive to — members plan to repurpose it into the Fred Rouse Center and Museum for Arts and Community Healing.

DNAWORKS, which co-convened the 1012 Leadership Coalition to work on the project, recently received a grant from the Ford Foundation. The money will be used to hire a project coordinator, a fundraising consultant and a communications consultant to help the organization reach its goal of purchasing and co-managing the building.

“It is incredibly important that we preserve the history,” Tatum said. “You can never really heal if you just ignore after it. It is incredibly important, whether it’s racial trauma or if it’s other trauma — all of that needs to be reconciled, and you don’t reconcile simply by forgetting.”

McKinney said demolishing the building wouldn’t end racism, but he hopes the relationships made inside the center could.

“Our vision is to use it as an educational tool,” he said, “to understand histories of oppression and, in turn, violence, and work toward moving in the direction of one another. Our vision is to use the space to heal the city. To repurpose this space, our goal is not to idolize hate or the KKK. Our work is actually to subvert those ideologies.”

As admirable as the cause may seem, it has obstacles.

Despite receiving support from city council members, the initiative has not yet garnered funding from the city. To start, purchasing and stabilizing the building would cost $4 million.

Some community members oppose the effort and would prefer to see the building demolished.

“It’s a conflicting emotion that we’re having to deal with in the midst of trying to heal and rebuild,” Tatum said. “On one hand, we’re celebrating, and on another, we’re remembering. And it’s just so much that’s causing the mental health drain in the Black community.”

Embracing this painful history, Tatum said, will be beneficial in the long run.

“The healing of our city means more to me than anything,” he said. “We cannot progress as a community, as a city, if we don’t heal from our past.”

Fred Rouse III says his father (pictured in the frame), who was only an infant when Fred Rouse was killed, never spoke about his father or the fate that befell him. Photo by Rodger Mallison

A Family Journey

For Fred Rouse III, healing from the crime began at age 46 in 2020 when he first learned the shattering truth about his grandfather, thanks to McKinney’s efforts to revive the name and the story.

Fred Rouse Jr., that infant who lost his father, was 53 when his own namesake was born. Fred Rouse III grew up in the small East Texas town of Corrigan with his great-grandmother. He remembers seeing his father fewer than 10 times — in his garden or tending to his bees — before Fred Rouse Jr. died at 64.

The first clue to the legacy of the family name came to Fred Rouse III when his wife, Moya, was digging into family ancestry online. She came across a document suggesting her father-in-law was born in Fort Worth, not Palestine, Texas, as the family thought.

Later in the summer, the Rouses saw a TV news segment highlighting a Juneteenth celebration put on by the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice. They learned of the group’s plan to install a plaque in the Stockyards to honor Fred Rouse.

Rouse said he initially played it off as a coincidence. His wife looked at him and said, “Wouldn’t that be crazy if he was a relative of yours?” After a few days of investigation, the realization set in that this man was indeed his grandfather.

“When it was confirmed, it was like OK … man, this is how my grandfather was killed,” Rouse said.

A whirlwind of emotions set in not long afterward.

“You know there’s anger and sadness,” he said. “I don’t know if revenge is an emotion, but you definitely have those days where you want something to happen to the people that did it. It’s a good feeling to know that out of the tragedy that happened to him is coming a beacon of light.”

Through the ebbs and flows of sadness and animosity toward the people who killed his grandfather, Rouse said he feels encouraged by the momentum toward some sort of belated justice.

“When you do somebody like that, the amount of hatred you had to have is just astonishing,” Rouse said. “When they did that, they thought they did something. Out of that darkness almost 100 years ago, they lit a torch that has never [gone] out to this day, and it never will. Such hatred lit that torch, and they really thought that that was the end, but it was only the beginning.”

Fred Rouse III learned about his grandfather's lynching in 2020. He has taken the Fort Worth Lynching Tour, which highlights areas such as the steps to Swift and Co. where Fred Rouse worked. Photo by Rodger Mallison

Leading On

TCU honored McKinney with the 2019 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award, which recognizes a faculty or staff member who enhances the university’s overarching diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

“I think he’s on his way to creating new ways to look at the differences of people,” Huynh said. “I just think he’s brilliant.”

After graduation, Huynh, now an apprentice at the Bruce Wood Dance Company, plans to pursue a professional dance career. She also hopes to attend law school to study human rights law.

“This work was never going to be easy, and that’s why the fight needs to continue to happen,” she said. “The work is not going to end until we see change.”

Kira Daniel, a sophomore modern dance major, said she hopes confronting Rouse’s story will bring perspective to today’s sociopolitical and racial climate.

“It’s interesting that with the lynching, which was almost 100 years ago, and then in 2020, we’re dealing with police brutality and racism,” Daniel said. “Still, we never drifted away from that. I think that people have failed to realize that lynching is still very present; however, it’s just taken on a new form.”

She said that now is the perfect moment to discuss these issues.

Adam W. McKinney says the Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse is "both an event to memorialize as well as to reclaim space and one another." Photo by Rodger Mallison

“When you look at the time we’re in, it’s important for these stories to be told,” she said. “People need to know. That way they can educate themselves, and the work [McKinney] is doing is taking that initiative.”

Fred Rouse III thinks the stars are aligning at the right time for maximum healing in the community. He took a direct step into the action at the start of 2021 by joining the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice as an executive board member.

“This project has definitely turned a tragedy to a triumph,” he said. “Where there was loss — or what they thought was loss — is now victory, and it’s going to be there for everybody to see.”

Rouse hopes his family’s trials will help inspire others who grieve the losses of loved ones due to racial injustice. “Isn’t that amazing, how one story can change lives and can change the world?

“If you’re going through tragedy today, look at what can happen,” Rouse said. “Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever lose hope because you’re not forgotten. It always works for the good.”

For McKinney, the project still has much work remaining. But he said he is optimistic about the changes to come. “I feel that we are at a particular tipping point in history when we get to get it right. We may not have many more opportunities like this one.”

“Where there was loss — or what they thought was loss — is now victory, and it’s going to be there for everybody to see.”

NILES CITY

Cattle was king in ‘the richest little city in the world.’

As the 20th century dawned, meatpacking companies and railroads were among the titans of American industry. Fort Worth, then a dusty outpost redolent with cow dung, was looking to grow with the help of outside investment.

In 1893, Boston businessmen Greenlief Simpson and Louville Niles bought the modest stockyards and packinghouse north of downtown and established the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company. This drew the interest of Chicago-based packinghouse behemoths, which wanted to come strike it rich(er) along the Cowtown rail lines.

In 1903, Swift and Armour, two of the biggest national slaughterhouses, opened massive Fort Worth facilities.

To avoid being annexed by Fort Worth and paying city taxes, the neighborhood surrounding the stockyards incorporated as Niles City in 1911. The fledgling “town” was about three miles north of downtown Fort Worth.

The city was home to the packing plants, Gulf Oil, two grain elevators and several livestock commissions, which together employed up to 10,000 people. Most of Niles City’s 500 residents worked at one of the slaughterhouses and rented homes from their big city-based employers. Niles City’s property was estimated to be worth $30 million in 1920 — almost $400 million today — earning it the nickname “Richest Little City in the World.” The 1-square-mile city established schools, a city government and police force.

Public servants from Niles City played roles in two grisly hangings from the same Samuels Avenue tree. In 1920, chauffeur Tom Vickery, a white man, was driving an allegedly intoxicated Niles City alderman before the two argued, drawing the attention of a Fort Worth policeman. Vickery shot and killed Officer Jeff Crouch and was later taken from his jail cell and hanged by unknown assailants.

Of the six men arrested — but never tried — for Fred Rouse’s 1921 kidnapping and lynching, two were Niles City policemen.

Fort Worth formally annexed Niles City on Aug. 1, 1923.

— Caroline Collier

In the early 1900s, Fort Worth allowed Niles City to remain independent, meaning it didn’t pay city taxes and could have a police force. Two Niles City policemen were indicted for Fred Rouse’s murder but never tried. Courtesy of Tarrant County Archives

TOUR RETURNS TO THE SCENES OF THE CRIME

Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse is a group bicycle and vehicle tour to five sites associated with the lynching of Fred Rouse in Fort Worth on Dec. 11, 1921. Organized by DNAWORKS, the tour is accompanied by an augmented reality app.

The tour caravans through the same streets that Rouse’s murderers did, but in a reverse route. “We move in the direction of healing,” said Adam W. McKinney, assistant professor of dance and co-director of DNAWORKS, during a December 2020 tour.

Visit dnaworks.org for more information

— Compiled by Trisha Spence

Sources: Adam W. McKinney, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dallas Morning News, Mike Nichols/hometown byhandlebar.com, lynchingintexas.org

VICTIMS OF A GRUESOME CRIME

The crime against Fred Rouse is the only documented racial-terror lynching in Fort Worth history. The Equal Justice Initiative, in a 2017 report, shares the sober reality that “lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today.”

Rouse’s lynching may be the only crime of this type to have appeared in Fort Worth media, but this does not mean he was the only local victim.

The Equal Justice Initiative considers the violence against white people in that era as a different phenomenon from the unaccounted-for killings of Black people that were equal parts terror and racism.

But white allies were not immune to the bloodshed related to the long civil rights struggle, as evidenced by these Civil War-era killings:

Anthony Bewley, 1860

Anthony Bewley, a white abolitionist, was hanged in Fort Worth before the Civil War. Bewley, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, lived with his family in Johnson County, Texas, about 30 miles south of Fort Worth. His views enraged community members, and when a letter to him (which may have been forged) emerged that encouraged him to continue his anti-slavery activities, it put a target on his back. Bewley and his family attempted to flee to Kansas but never made it. On Sept. 3, 1860, he was captured en route by a group of vigilantes. Ten days later, captors returned him to Fort Worth, where a lynch mob hanged him the same night. Weeks later, his bones were excavated, stripped of remaining skin and thrown atop the Ephraim Daggett storehouse. Local lore claims Bewley’s bones remained on the roof of the store until after the Civil War. Legend has it that children played with them before they were formed into a skeleton and placed in a doctor’s office next to a sign reading “Thus be it ever with abolitionists.”

Gainesville, Texas, 1862

In October 1862, Cooke County in North Texas was a political hot spot for debate over secession and slavery. The majority of the landowners in the county were not enslavers. The local vote in favor of remaining in the Union made Cooke and its county seat of Gainesville outliers in Texas. The state had seceded in 1861, and Confederate sentiments in the county were still strong. Any man in the area who refused to join the Confederate army was arrested; nearly 200 men in the county were taken into captivity. A citizens court jury consisting mostly of enslavers was assembled. Over the course of several days, the court convicted some of the men on counts of treason and hanged them; others it simply handed over to an angry mob. In total, about 40 men were executed for their so-called crimes by hanging; several more were shot for attempting to flee. The event is known as the Great Hanging at Gainesville.

— Brandon Kitchin and Caroline Collier

Courtesy of gainesvilletx1862.blogspot.com

MCKINNEY EXPLORES HIS ROOTS THROUGH DANCE ON FILM

DNAWORKS has launched multiple initiatives to promote community-building through the arts and reconciling histories of oppression. HaMapah/The Map Dance-on-Film, a project released in 2021, follows Adam W. McKinney on a genealogical journey from Benin to Poland and across the United States as he encounters places central to his African, Native American and Jewish roots.

“I am the map, the quilt and the tablecloth of those who have come before me,” McKinney says in the film. HaMapah, which translates to map or tablecloth, is the name of the commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, or the Code of Jewish Law. The text, McKinney said, was written by his Polish ancestor Rabbi Moshe Isserles.

During the 30-minute film, producer Laura Bustillos Jáquez weaves together McKinney’s family records, stories, songs, photos and video — all passed down through generations — as he dances at the locations where his ancestors lived.

McKinney shares the story of his parents, who overcame the difficulties of being an interracial couple in the United States in the 1960s. “I was born into, and am a product of, the American civil rights movement,” he said.

Neither of his parents’ families supported the union. McKinney reveals in the film that his maternal grandmother was so against the relationship that she bought a gun to discourage the couple. His mother, of Eastern European Jewish descent, and his father, of African and Native American descent, ultimately eloped in 1965.

“I almost wasn’t because of the fear and misunderstanding that can happen between groups of people,” McKinney says in the film. In the concluding scene, a video of his parents consoling each other is projected into the night as he stands outside his childhood home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

After every performance, McKinney and his husband, Daniel Banks, director of the project, look to engage the audience in a community story circle where participants share their own family histories. McKinney said he hopes his vulnerability helps people come together.

“I am interested in creating opportunities for people to move in the direction of one another — to work toward what I call an aesthetic of liberation,” he said. “This is accomplished through personal and communal research, through dialogue and finally, through action. We can create the world that we want.”

— Brandon Kitchin

Courtesy of Adam W. McKinney | Photo by Daniel Banks

RACIAL BIAS COLORS MEDIA COVERAGE

A century ago, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram chronicled the city’s large Ku Klux Klan organization as official city news. An October 1916 story announced that the acting Fort Worth police commissioner directed his assistant to organize a KKK rally for a fall parade at which the men would don “the famous Ku Klux costume.” On that festive Halloween night, the story said, “a large number of policemen and citizens will join the klan.”

The Star-Telegram’s coverage of Black residents in the early 20th century was less comprehensive. Stories from 1921 and 1922 about the crime against Fred Rouse contain no details about who the man was, nor do they mention anything about his widow or children. The original news story placed heavy emphasis on a pair of brothers shot, allegedly by Rouse, during a fight outside of the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant. The reporter interviewed only a Niles City policeman (who was later arrested for the lynching) and gave little mention of the harassment Rouse and other strikebreakers faced as they left work.

“Crime coverage, which includes the police beat and criminal courts, has long been a staple of American journalism,” said Jean Marie Brown ’13 MS, assistant professor of professional practice at TCU and director of student media. Her research on systemic racism and the history of reporting biases in newsrooms examines police coverage and the narratives historically applied to communities of color. “Critics have long maligned the overrepresentation of Black people in crime coverage and the resulting distortion in community perceptions,” she said.

Deborah Douglas, a professor of journalism at DePauw University, goes deeper. “We go to the police and regard them as official sources, and we take what they give us and we publish it,” she said. This preference and protocol for relying on police accounts can frame events involving communities of color in a biased manner.

Fred Rouse III said he sees similarities between the news stories about his grandfather’s death and the ways crime news is presented in the media today. He said he hopes that media consumers will consider different perspectives when they read and hear about crime.

“These folks have tried to sweep it up under the rug all these years,” Rouse said. “We can pull the rug back and expose it.”

— Brandon Kitchin

Never Too Late to Say His Name

Why is this the time for a deeper dive into reconciliation and remembrance? TCU professor Adam W. McKinney, Juneteenth activist Opal Lee and Fred Rouse III, whose grandfather was lynched in 1921, discuss the more difficult aspects of Texas history.

Footnotes

We present events in this story as most likely facts, given our interpretation of contradictory and biased records, and what we know to be true amid the racism and violence in Fort Worth at that time.

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