First Published:
1:16 PM PDT, June 3, 2022
A former meeting place of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas is being transformed into a cultural center, according to CBS News.
The project, known as Transform1012, received $3 million in federal funding on Tuesday, according to CBS News
It will go towards transforming the derelict building on Main Street in Fort Worth, which will be named after Fred Rouse, a Black man who was lynched about a mile from the site a century ago, CBS News reported.
“This funding is going to help bolster reparative justice,” Congressman Marc Veasey said in a statement to Star Telegram. It “will commemorate those who have suffered from racially and culturally directed violence and oppression.”
The space was built in 1924 by the white supremacist group and was used as their headquarters in the Fort Worth area.
“We’ve lost so many stories because a building has gotten too old,” Veasey told Star Telegram.
He added that the project will “be something that’s going to be much, much more powerful than had it been reduced to rubble.”
The new center will now be used by local artists and social justice leaders as a community center and arts hub they hope will inspire moments of “truth-telling and healing,” the group’s website said, according to The Smithsonian.
The plans for the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing also include a performance space, museum exhibits, and a resource center for LGBTQ youth, CBS News reported.
The project was started when Adam W. McKinney began researching the murder of Fred Rouse, a Black butcher lynched by a white mob in Fort Worth in 1921.
McKinney, a dance professor and ballet dancer, learned about the hate group’s former headquarters in Fort Worth and discovered that it was still standing, The Smithsonian reported.
“When I think about this place and the hatred that members of this place, the KKK, how they went out into the community and struck fear in a lot of residents,” Fred Rouse III, the grandson of Rouse, told CBS News.
