FORT WORTH
LYNCHING TOUR
Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse
Nominated for The Drama League's 2021 Outstanding Interactive or Socially-Distanced Theater Award
Made possible with funding from:
Asylum Arts, City of Fort Worth Diversity & Inclusion Department,
DuBose Family Foundation, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Rainwater Charitable Foundation, and an anonymous Fund at the North
Texas Community Foundation
These tours are co-produced with Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice
ABOUT THE PROJECT
*Content warning: references to racial violence
Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse (FWLT) is an interactive, bike, car, and virtual tour to four sites associated with the December 11, 1921 racial terror lynching of Mr. Fred Rouse in Fort Worth, TX. The tour is accompanied by a downloadable, augmented reality, phone/tablet app that is used at each of the four sites—or remotely—to understand and process the history of the murder of Mr. Rouse at the hands of a white mob.
The goal of the tour is to generate community healing through
memorial activism. Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the
Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse invites participants to ask the questions,
“What, how, why, and whom do we remember?”
FWLT had in-person, socially distant runs in December 2020 and
March-May 2021 in partnership with Fort Worth Bike Sharing and
Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice.
We are currently offering remote tours via Zoom and taking
reservations for group tours.
The in-person tour lasts approximately three hours (the bike tour
is a little longer). As part of the tour, DNAWORKS hosts a
Community Storycircle for participants to process the tour experience
together and share stories of resistance, resilience, and healing.
Participants can take the tour either by bicycle
(bicycle rentals included in the tours) or in their own cars.
Reservations are pay-what-you-can.
CONTEXT AND PHILOSOPHY
In the 1920s, Fort Worth, TX had one of the largest Ku Klux Klan memberships in the United States. Klan members paraded openly through downtown Fort Worth dressed in full regalia. The murderers of Mr. Rouse, arriving in a caravan of cars, kidnapped him from City & County Hospital before killing him. And after Mr. Rouse was hanged, hundreds of people drove to the site of the lynching to witness the result of the murder.
With Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse, we work to dismantle racism and undo the effects of anti-Black racial terror violence by coming together and physicalizing liberation. We do this by caravaning through the same streets that the Klan did and reversing their route, riding bicycles and driving cars openly to remember Mr. Rouse. Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse is both an event to memorialize as well as to reclaim space and one another.
PRODUCTION TEAM
Concept and Choreography
Adam W. McKinney
Director
Daniel Banks
Music
Third Wind Productions (Maritri Garrett and David Winder)
Graphic Design
Troy Lambert
App Design
Digital Ant Media
Tintype Photography
Will Wilson
Associate Producer
Jiles King
Production Associate
NaTasha Thompson
Production Managers
Jamelyn Ebelacker,
Stephanie Montes de Oca Frias
Production Assistant
Lauren Huynh
Sound Engineering
Michael Billow and
Gregg Powers
Guest Artists:
Edykah Chilome, Julienne Greer, Sedrick Huckaby, Jordan Jones, Opal Lee, Pastor Kyev P. Tatum, Sr.
Fort Worth Lynching Tour Community: Honoring the Memory of Fred Rouse
Community Circle of Leaders and Supporters
Tori Adams
Amphibian Stage Productions
CityEquity USA, Inc.
Ayesha Ganguly/Windows on Your World
Tammy Melody Gomez, Sound Culture
MiShon Landry, CEO, Inclusive Leadership Institute
LGBTQ SAVES
Ministers Justice Coalition of Texas
Near Southside Arts
New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church
Tamara Payne/Ensemble Coworking
Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
The Projects Group
Third Space DFW
Estrus Tucker, DEI Consultants, LLC
Texas Christian University Race and Reconciliation Initiative
Teresa Coleman Wash, Bishop Arts Theatre Center