Fort Worth asks, Can a klan hall become a place of healing?

Two weeks before Christmas, in 1921, Fred Rouse was lying in a hospital bed, recovering from being beaten and stabbed by striking meatpacking workers.

Rouse was one of the black workers and immigrants hired to break the strike. He was leaving his shift when he was surrounded and threatened by striking workers, according to Fort Worth Star Telegram reports. Afraid for his life, Rouse shot and wounded two men before the crowd chased him down and beat him so badly police initially thought he was dead.

He had been in the hospital for five nights when about 30 white men came and took him from his hospital bed. He was found dead the next morning, riddled with bullets and hanging by a rope from a hackberry tree.

The hackberry tree was on Samuels Avenue about a mile from the Tarrant County courthouse, and about the same distance from a large meeting hall recently built by the Ku Klux Klan…

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