SCAB: Swift & Co. Meatpacking
Plant, Fort Worth, TX, 2019

SCAB: Swift & Co. Meatpacking
Plant, Fort Worth, TX, 2019

Mr. Fred Rouse was a nonunion butcher for Swift & Co. Meatpacking Plant in the Niles City Stockyards (now in Fort Worth’s Northside neighborhood). On Tuesday, December 6, 1921, at 4:30 p.m., when leaving work, Mr. Rouse was threatened and accosted by strikers and agitators. Mr. Rouse was shoved, then stabbed. As he defended himself from the crowd, a struggle ensued and Mr. Rouse was accused of shooting two white men. A mob then began to beat and bludgeon Mr. Rouse with a streetcar guardrail. With his skull fractured in two places, internal injuries, and several stab wounds, Mr. Rouse was left for dead in the middle of Exchange Avenue. Niles City police officers asked the mob to relinquish Mr. Rouse to law enforcement. They placed Mr. Rouse’s body in the back of a police car. On the way to the mortuary, discovering that he was still alive, they drove him south to City & County Hospital.

2019

Digital photography

In copyright

Ku Klux Klan (20th century)--Texas

Fort Worth (Tex.)

Rouse, Fred