Hagar Tucker

The plaque gives Tucker's years on the force; the silence after him matters as much. BlackPast's history of Fort Worth's Black community says the city council hired him in 1873 as a special policeman for the Black community, an unusual step then, and let him go within a year when the economy collapsed. He was the first and the last Black officer in the department until 1953, when four Black men were hired. A few years later only one of them, Lonnell Cooper, was still on the job, and he was assigned to community relations at headquarters.

What the plaque says

Hagar Tucker (1842-1892) Hagar Tucker was the first African American policeman in Fort Worth, notable in 1870s Texas. Born into slavery, he came here from Kentucky in 1857 and was emancipated in 1865. One of the first African Americans in the county registered to vote, he was appointed a "special policeman" in 1873, partly through influence of former master Wm. B. Tucker, then alderman. Hagar was the only Black on the force, one of few until the 1950s. Paid separately from other police, he could only patrol Black neighborhoods. He served a short time, later working other jobs and eventually returning to the Wm. B. Tucker household with his wife Amy and three daughters. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — 1.2 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 1.3 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 1.9 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 2.3 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• William Madison McDonald — steps away
• Governor Charles A. Culberson — steps away
• General Thomas N. Waul, C.S.A. — steps away
• John Peter Smith_Oakwood Cemetery Founder — steps away