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Four design teams shortlisted for former KKK site reclamation project in Texas

2023-10-11T17:51:00-04:00

A four-finalist shortlist for Transform 1012 N. Main Street’s adaptive reuse and racial equity project has been announced as part of a multiphase selection process that will eventually deliver the new Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing to Fort Worth, Texas.

The chance at redesigning what was once the Ku Klux Klan Klavern No. 101 Auditorium will fall on a proposal that best expresses and reflects the group’s reclamatory mission while “[prioritizing] community, equity, and collective healing in the design of the space” above all other considerations of site and material.

“The exceptional quality of the submissions prompted us to expand the initially envisioned shortlist from three to four teams and to extend our selection deadline for a few days,” Ben Crawford, the Chair of Transform 1012’s Design Architect Selection Committee, added. “We are thrilled to welcome these architects to Fort Worth to see how they could be a partner in reimagining the processes for enacting th...

Selection process detailed for historic reuse of former KKK site as a cultural arts center in Fort Worth

2023-06-29T19:56:00-04:00

Transform 1012 N. Main Street, the non-profit coalition responsible for a new reclamation project targeting a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, has just announced the next phases of the selection process for an architect who will eventually deliver The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing in what is being pitched as an "act of reparative justice" for the community.

Eight months after the process began, work will now continue towards the ultimate goal of creating a unifying cultural hub replete with state-of-the-art performance spaces, arts educational offerings, room for social service organizations that work with LGBTQ+ youth, a maker space, and exhibition areas dedicated toward social justice programming.

The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing Exterior. Concept rendering by MASS Design Group. Courtesy of Transform 1012 N. Main Street.

The space is named in honor of Fred Rouse, a local Black man who was lynched by a white mob in 1921, t...

Former KKK auditorium to be reborn as a cultural arts center in Fort Worth

2022-05-20T15:28:00-04:00

A Texas-based, non-profit by the name of Transform 1012 N. Main Street (Transform 1012) has announced the purchase of a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas. It will be converted into The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing, a new cultural hub and space for reconciliation and reclamation for the community.

The auditorium, located at 1012 N. Main Street, originally opened in 1924, when Fort Worth had one of the largest KKK memberships in the United States. It served as the group’s headquarters in Texas and was designed to intimidate Black, Hispanic, and immigrant residents returning home from the city center.

The acquisition served as the driving force behind the formation of Transform 1012 in 2019. The non-profit is a coalition of local arts, grassroots, and service organizations as well as pro bono partners and individuals. The purchase of the building was made possible by a significant donation from the former owners and a grant from the Rainwater Char...

America's long overdue memorial to the victims of lynchings opens in Alabama today

2018-04-26T14:01:00-04:00

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.

In a week that began with Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama, a new chapter of American history has begun today with the official opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a place so central to the crimes and injustice of white supremacy in the South. The memorial commemorates and dignifies the more than 4,400 black men, women, and children who were lynched by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

Image: Equal Justice Initiative

"The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given," Campbell Robertson writes for the New York Times. "But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings."

Why Build a Lynching Memorial? Video via Equal Justice Initiative on YouTube.

The memorial aims to educate for a more informed dialogue and includes a section with material on volunteer opportuni...

The Alabama memorial dedicated to African-American lynchings

2018-04-09T20:52:00-04:00

Uneven, rusted steel is meant to echo the many shades and skin tones of those African-Americans lynched.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which Oprah Winfrey
visited, opens to the public on April 26, 2018. She talked with criminal
defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is behind the project.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Montgomery, Alabama plans a memorial to the 4,000+ victims of lynchings throughout the U.S.

2017-08-21T18:08:00-04:00

Slated to open in 2018, the Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama will seek to tell the truth. Six acres of land owned by the Equal Justice Initiative—the legal services nonprofit Stevenson founded in 1989—will memorialize the more than 4,000 victims of what Stevenson calls racial terror lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. A nearby museum will tell the history of slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration as a single narrative.

Designed by MASS Design Group—which has previously worked on the Kigali Genocide Memorial—the memorial stems from a comprehensive report on lynchings released in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative. The memorial will feature six-foot columns, each representing counties where lynchings took place. For each column, a duplicate will be placed in the surrounding courtyard and eventually relocated to their respective counties as they directly confront their part in this history.

From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration

2016-08-18T02:09:00-04:00

Last year, the group released a report documenting more than 4,000 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. After that report, Mr. Stevenson launched a project to collect soil from unmarked lynching sites around the country. The soil will be placed in glass jars that will be on display at the museum.

Campbell Robertson highlights plans by the Equal Justice Initiative, to build a national memorial to victims of lynching and open a museum that explores African American history from enslavement to mass incarceration.

h/t @Rob Holmes