The family of Fort Worth’s only recorded Black lynching victim has stepped away from nonprofit Transform 1012 N. Main Street’s redevelopment of a former Ku Klux Klan hall into a cultural hub.
Fred Rouse III, the grandson of Fred Rouse, resigned from his board position at Transform 1012 and will now focus on the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, a nonprofit he leads as president to build a separate memorial dedicated to his grandfather — the Mr. Fred Rouse Memorial.
As of late July, the Northside project — originally dubbed the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing — was moving forward under the name Transform 1012 Center for Arts and Community Healing.
In a statement shared Wednesday with the Fort Worth Report, Rouse added that his family has removed the Fred Rouse Foundation from the Transform 1012 Coalition — a group of seven nonprofits and businesses leading the former KKK hall’s redevelopment.
Asked by the Report why he resigned, Rouse said that “it was time.” He has served on the board since 2022, according to tax filings, and been involved with the redevelopment project for the last six years.
Fred Rouse was lynched by a white mob in Fort Worth on Dec. 11, 1921, on the corner of NE 12th Street and Samuels Avenue. He was initially attacked by striking meatpacking workers from the Stockyards, then transported to a hospital from which he was abducted and hanged. The Mr. Fred Rouse Memorial, at 1000 NE 12th St., is expected to be completed by November or December.
During his tenure with Transform 1012, Rouse was heavily involved with sharing his family’s story during community input sessions and doing “everything that I could do to honor my grandfather,” he said.
“I have been one of the loudest voices supporting my grandfather and I really love the community for its support as well,” he said. “My 100% focus is on the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice and trying to get the Mr. Fred Rouse Memorial site completed.”
Transform 1012 executive director Carlos Gonzalez-Jaime said the nonprofit’s board of directors is grateful for Rouse’s contributions to the organization and that they wish him well, but are “not in a position to speak to his personal decision.”
The Rouse family’s involvement grew in 2022 when Transform 1012 acquired the former KKK meeting space at 1012 N. Main St. Their ancestor’s name was adopted for the center for the following four years, in an arrangement Gonzalez-Jaime characterized as “informal.”
“Transform 1012 did this totally, solely on their own,” Rouse said of the recent change. “When they made that decision to not put the name on the building, not only did that decision hurt the Rouse family, but it hurt a lot of people in this community.”
Gonzalez-Jaime said Transform 1012 and the Rouses could not come to a formal agreement. He added that it was not the outcome anyone hoped for.
“After all this period of negotiation with the family, (the Transform 1012 board) came to the decision that they could not agree on the terms that the family wanted,” Gonzalez-Jaime said.
When the Transform 1012 project began, early conversations about naming the center after Fred Rouse were unofficial, Gonzalez-Jaime said. Discussions around the licensing began earlier this year, he said.
“The board concluded it could not reach an agreement it believed was responsible, sustainable and consistent with its ethical, financial and fiduciary obligations as a nonprofit organization,” Gonzalez-Jaime said.
A trademark for “Fred Rouse” was filed on May 16, 2025, but abandoned on July 27, 2026, because no statement of use was timely filed after the notice of allowance was issued, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A previous trademark for the name was also filed in 2022.
The family filed the trademark as a precautionary measure to make sure organizations did not profit off the name, Rouse said. He was not aware of the trademark’s current status before speaking with the Report, but later said that it was being fixed and that the family plans to continue owning the trademark “for the next 1,000 years.”
Transform 1012 remains committed to keeping Rouse’s story present through educational programming and exhibitions that spotlight the history of race relations in North Texas, Gonzalez-Jaime said.
Rouse told the Report he does not know whether there will be any future engagements between Transform 1012 and the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice.
The Fred Rouse Foundation plans to focus on hosting clothing drives and providing health, financial and educational resources to Fort Worth’s underserved communities, according to its website.
Disclosure: Fort Worth Report director of membership Ayesha Ganguly is co-founder and board co-chair of Transform 1012 N. Main Street. At the Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
David Moreno is the arts and culture reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at david.moreno@fortworthreport.org.
Ismael M. Belkoura is the nonprofit editor for the Fort Worth Report. His position is supported by a grant from North Texas Community Foundation. Contact him at ismael.belkoura@fortworthreport.org.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
