Fred Rouse was a butcher at the Swift plant in the Fort Worth Stockyards, then part of the separate town of Niles City. He married Eliza Waldon in 1916, and their youngest child was born in 1921. Historians describe him as the only Black person known to have been lynched in Fort Worth.
The strike
On November 28, 1921, the five big meatpackers imposed a 10 percent wage cut. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, a union of almost entirely white members, called a strike from December 5. Black workers were barred from the union, and packers across the country brought them in as replacements.
At about 4:15 p.m. on December 6, Rouse left the Swift plant and was surrounded by picketers. He was stabbed. News reports said he fired a pistol and wounded two brothers, Tom and Tracy Maclin, and the crowd beat him with iron bars. Niles City police took him from the mob. Rouse went to the basement ward for Black patients at City-County Hospital, his skull fractured.
December 11
Around 11 p.m. on Sunday, December 11, a group of white men, estimated at between about twenty-five and thirty, entered the hospital. The night supervisor, Essie Slaton, and Dr. W. F. Keye said they tried to stop them and gave way when threatened. The men took Rouse out in his hospital gown, drove him to a hackberry tree at Samuels Avenue and East Twelfth Street, hanged him and shot him. The landowner had the tree cut down on December 14. Rouse was buried on December 12 in New Trinity Cemetery in Haltom City. No headstone has been located.
The record and the remembering
By December 23 a grand jury had questioned about 100 people and found that Rouse had been given too little police protection. In February 1922 the Niles City police chief, G. H. Tiller, officer W. H. Atherton and Rock Island switchman Tom Howell were arrested, and the grand jury then declined to indict. Later that year it returned indictments against six men: those three, Bud Madden, John Roberts and "Bugger Red" Cantrell. Sources differ on whether that came in September or October. In 1924 the cases were still pending, and no one was ever convicted.
The Klan was growing across Texas as those cases dragged on, and by 1923 it held firm control of Fort Worth's city government.
The story was largely lost until 2018, when Bradley Borougerdi, a Tarrant County College historian, saw Rouse's name at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. His work helped form the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice, now led by Rouse's grandson, Fred Rouse III. On December 11, 2021, a hundred years on, a marker was dedicated with the Rouse family. In 2025 the Fort Worth City Council approved $232,377 toward a public memorial at the site.
The memorial ground is still being built, so start in the Fort Worth Stockyards, where the Armour and Company marker covers the packinghouse workforce. Rouse's marker stands at the northeast corner of the Maddox-Muse Center on East Fourth Street downtown.