In the shadows of the Fort Worth Stockyards, a century-long hidden history is buried.
On the corner of Northeast 12th Street and Samuels Avenue sits the Fred Rouse memorial site. The empty plot of land is the site where the husband, father and black citizen was lynched by a white mob on December 11th, 1921.
Rouse, a union butcher at Swift & Company meat-packing is the only recorded African American to have been lynched in Tarrant County.
His grandson, Fred Rouse III never knew the story of his grandfather’s murder.
“I’ve been in Dallas-Fort Worth my entire adult life since I was 22 and never knew anything about the story,” Rouse III said.
That all changed when the North Texas man’s phone rang on a quiet evening in 2021.
“Boom. It’s like lightning struck,” Rouse III said.
Rouse, 46 at the time, was at home watching the NBA finals when the call came in. It was about his genealogy.
That’s how Rouse III learned that his grandfather, Fred Rouse, was the victim of a lynching more than 100 years ago.
From that day on, nothing was the same. Rouse III was in a state of shock.
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SOURCE: WFAA, Adriana De Alba
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