FORT WORTH, Texas _ Hate built the building, but a Fort Worth group thinks love can restore the former Ku Klux Klan Hall on North Main as a site of healing.
The group has 180 days to come to agreement with the owners, Sugarplum Holdings, which had sought to demolish the auditorium turned pecan plant. It may be the last standing purpose-built Klan building in the United States, but DNAWORKS, a service organization that promotes cultural expression through the performing arts, thinks it can be an international center for peace and healing.
Adam McKinney, a TCU professor and co-director of DNAWORKS, pitched turning the large building at 1012 N. Main St. into an performance arts venue with an education center devoted to "peace and reconciliation training." He said a transformed Klan hall would put Fort Worth at the center of national conversations about healing. A small group that spoke before a city commission on historic landmarks agreed.
"We can not only tell the history but also offer potential solutions," McKinney said. "Transforming the space places community at the center of those conversations and helps build the capacity for healing."
The building was built in 1924 and rebuilt a short time later after being firebombed. Klansmen and Klanswomen filled the building's large auditorium, likely plotting ways to torture the burgeoning black, immigrant and Roman Catholic north side community, for about seven years.
Just a few years before its construction, Fred Rouse, a black man who wanted a job in a packinghouse, was severely beaten and stabbed. When the mob failed to kill him, they pulled him from what is now John Peter Smith Hospital and lynched him.
Robert Rouse, a descendant of Fred Rouse, said the building was built by "narrow minded people" but demolishing it would not erase hate.
"Let's turn it into a flower," he said. "Let's turn it into something people can't recognize."
Estrus Tucker agreed, saying the building offered a "quality of truth telling" not available anywhere. He listed several other places that now serve as memorials, like the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
"These places teach us and offer powerful opportunities for healing and transformation," he said.
By the 1930s the building had become an auditorium hosting boxing and wrestling and then in 1946 it was sold to Ellis Pecan Co. Sugarplum Holdings has owned it since 2004 and it had deteriorated since.
Justin Light, a Fort Worth attorney representing Sugarplum Holdings, said the company supported a 180-day extension and exploring alternatives to demolition. He couldn't provide specific plans for the building when asked by the commission.
The commission voted 5-1 Monday for the 180-day delay in the demolition.
Billy Ray Daniels, the lone no vote, rejected the notion that the Klan's short lifespan in the building somehow lessened its significance as a symbol of hate.
"In my opinion to leave this standing would perpetuate that racial problem that we have yet to really get a handle on," he said.
The lot would have a prime riverfront location if the Trinity River bypass channel project is finished. In a staff report, other options for the building include a museum of diversity and tolerance or the headquarters of the Trinity River Vision Authority, the local coordinator of the river project.
An engineering group hired by Sugarplum wrote in the city application that the auditorium needs $8-$10 million worth of work, but McKinney said he's not satisfied with that estimate.
He said DNAWORKS would use the 180 days to contact other community groups interested in using the building and begin hunting for donors. The group had already received support from around the country, McKinney said, including a unnamed donor who promised to provide a Holocaust artifact for the education center.
DNAWORKS would operate a performance space along with meeting and classrooms devoted to equity and social justice. The building could have other uses depending on what other Fort Worth groups want to do, said Daniel Banks, DNAWORKS co-director.
"We envision a space where local stories are accessible, where you really cannot leave the building unchanged," Banks said.
