This weekend’s Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse is a group bus and car tour specifically for the TCU community to visit the sites associated with the 1921 lynching of Mr. Rouse in Fort Worth. A program of DNAWORKS, the tour invites participants to ask, “What, how, why and whom do we remember?”
All students, faculty and staff are invited to participate in the bus tour from 1-5 p.m. Saturday, April 17. Registration is free.
Charter busses will depart from and return to the BLUU on the TCU campus for the April 17 event. The tour will visit locations throughout Fort Worth, including The Stockyards, NE 12th Street & Samuels Ave., 4th & Jones Street and 1012 N. Main Street.
During the tour, participants will visit four sites together as a community to remember, to pay homage, to notice, to learn and to activate justice. The tour aims to generate community healing through memorial activism.
Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse began in December 2020 in honor of the 99th anniversary of the lynching of Mr. Fred Rouse and will run through May 2. Additional tours will be hosted intermittently leading up to the 100th anniversary of the lynching in December 2021.
“We are leading this work to centralize the story of Mr. Rouse and to ensure that we all know about this history. In so doing, we hope that racial terror violence will end," Adam W. McKinney, assistant professor of dance and co-director of DNAWORKS, said.
The tour is accompanied by a free, downloadable, augmented reality app that is used to research and discover the history of Mr. Rouse’s death.
Following the tour, DNAWORKS – Dialogue and Healing Through the Arts, led by Professor McKinney and Dr. Daniel Banks, will host a Community Storycircle for the TCU community to process the tour experience together and share stories of resistance, resilience and healing. The post-tour fellowship will include a free, catered meal.
The April 17 TCU-specific tour is co-sponsored by the Race & Reconciliation Initiative, Inclusiveness and Intercultural Services and the Black Faculty and Staff Association.
Read more about this event on KERA’s Art & Seek website.