If you want someone to feel intimidated, you build something big.

If you want them to feel extremely intimidated, you make it big and you make it bright red.

It has a very heavy presence in this area.

We can kind of imagine how it felt for the communities that lived on the north side and were constantly connecting to downtown, passing by.

When you hear that it was a KKK building, it leaves an impression on anyone that is about to enter the building.

And I, as a black American, immediately imagined 4000 people facing me.

That would have never allowed me into this building.

My name is Dennis Chiesa.

I'm Maria Gomes.

My name is Jermaine Barnes, and I'm one of the design architects that were chosen to help transform this building into a place of hope and joy.

Where we are now is historically a KKK headquarters.

It was a place where approximately 4000 people would gather to spew hateful ideologies.

So how do we, through architecture then redefine what that is and try to ensure that everyone that enters this building has a sense of dignity, right?

And you do that by not tearing the building down, because if you tear the building down, there's no proof that this ever happened.

There's no proof that this ever existed.

You know, the Klan history is is is pretty fascinating.

Of course, the first incarnation was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War in 1915, D.W.

Griffith produced a film called birth of a nation.

The point of birth of a nation was to portray the Klan as saviors.

The modern Klan gets its start, I think, about 1916, just a year after the film.

The meetings were secret, you know, they were not open to everyone, but they were a very open presence.

You know, they would take out full page ads in the newspaper talking about, you know, this is who we are and what we do.

And, and of course, they touted themselves as we're simply, you know, one more fraternal organization like the Knights of Columbus.

You know, they would conduct picnics.

I mean, they had an organized children's camp out on the shores of Lake Worth.

You know, the Ku Klux Klan camp for kids.

There was a women's auxiliary.

It was basically, you know, a church organization.

But the underlying message, though, was one of making sure that everybody knew where they stood.

And in the hierarchy of an organized society.

And, you know, from the Klan perspective, you know, native born white Protestant Christians were the top of that pecking order.

We don't really see them in Fort Worth in a major way until 1921.

You know, when the accounts talk about anywhere between 600 and 1000 initiates, you know, at one single ceremony leading up to what would be the 1922 elections where Klan candidates largely swept almost every public office in Fort Worth and Tarrant County.

It was understood that many elected officials could not be elected unless they were.

Members of the Klan are certainly sympathetic to the Klan, so you had judges in the courthouse.

You had people in the statehouse who were all connected to the Klan.

And we knew that.

We understood that growing up.

And Bobby Sanders, most people around here know me as a journalist, and some people call me troublemaker.

But when Swift and Armor opened their side by side operations in what we know today is the Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District set off a population boom here and unrivaled in the city's history.

Between 1900 and 1910, the city's population tripled.

And a good part of that population growth came from an immigrant population because as the packing plants opened here, they solicited and opened up job opportunities.

If you read on some of the articles from 100 years ago that talk about the number of languages that were spoken in the stockyard, management teams needed translators for the translators.

100 years ago, there were streetcars that connected the north side of Fort Worth through to downtown.

Right.

So this is right in the middle and in the place where you had all these different groups from all over the place, from all over the world that came here to work.

And so it was it seems like it was strategically placed to intimidate and to push some of those folks out.

They were, you know, super proud of the building.

You know, the the local newspapers ran kind of successive pictures of, you know, construction progress and how things were coming along with it.

It had the best lights.

It had the, you know, an enormous stage house.

It was a place that people visited.

I think frequently there were touring shows that came here.

It hosted some remarkable opening guests.

You know, the Saint Louis Symphony here with one of the greatest sopranos in the country coming to perform in October of 24.

Houdini was here and really got off to a pretty, pretty good start up until that, that fire in November of, of 1924.

You know, and I think it certainly served the Klan's purposes to let people think that it was an arson fire, that somebody was deliberately targeting the Klan.

We don't have any evidence that really supports that.

It's a great story.

But and it may well just have started in the electrical box behind, but it was almost a total loss.

So they rebuilt it almost as quickly as the original had had gone up.

And it was a pretty fast track by the time we get to 1925, just, you know, a year after this building is built, there's already a statewide movement to curtail the Klan activities.

The biggest thing there was, you know, the 1925 anti masking law that was passed after Miriam Ferguson became governor and it physically stripped the Klan of anonymity.

That's the idea of the Klan is the secrecy is you put on the garb, nobody can see that you might be a dentist or a lawyer or an elementary school teacher.

You could be convicted of a felony.

If you abducted someone, accosted them, you know, even stopped them on the street while wearing a mask.

And you know that that idea that, oh, well, everybody now is going to know who I am when I'm doing this.

And it sort of pushed a lot of it underground.

I think.

For a time this was, you know, a public boxing arena.

And then starting in, I think, 1947, the local pecan shelling company, Ellis Pecan, moved all of their operations into the building.

Now, I think the historical juxtaposition of, you know, starting as the Klan hall and then spending most of its career with nuts of another fashion.

And of course, there were a lot of architectural historians, a lot of people who said, scrape it clean.

We don't need the memory.

So I heard from a lot of different folks across Fort where you had folks who were saying, absolutely, this is a great idea.

This is something that we need for our city.

You have folks who said, why are we keeping the building right?

Maybe we keep the shell, but do something different.

And then you have the other end of the spectrum of folks who were saying, we don't need the space, we don't need this building.

My name is Jalen Gordon.

I was one of two consulting firms brought on to help them design, manage and facilitate.

We really helped them.

Nuance.

What is their framework for community engagement?

Community engagement is not a part of the process.

It is the process.

And we've had numerous sessions with numerous constituency groups to make sure that we understood we were listening, and there's been a consistent feedback loop to where nothing that's designed was not informed by actual conversations.

When aims hopefully.

I've been in Fort Worth almost since the year one.

That's not to the but the 1930s.

And I do the Juneteenth celebration here in Fort Worth every year.

You know, the building had been here so long and nothing done.

And to find out the people who are going to actually make this something that the whole community could use, I could have done a whole a dance.

I think history should be nuanced, and that's something that I think this project is doing right.

It is forcing ourselves to ask a lot of questions, not only as people who live in a city, but as people who engage with architecture on an everyday basis.

There were other people, I mean people I'm close to who said, no, we need to tear it down because it had been headquarters for the Klan.

I didn't think this building should be torn down because first of all, I don't think you should try to erase history.

You don't erase it, you expand on it.

You tell it.

You tell it all, and you tell it well.

I'm Carlos Gonzalez, mayor, so I am the executive director of transform 1012.

We are a nonprofit organization.

Our mission is to transform a former Ku Klux Klan building in Fort Worth, Texas, into this.

The federal center for Arts and Community Healing.

Fred Rouse was the only case recorder of a black man lynched in Fort Worth, Texas.

So the center is honoring his memory.

My name is Fred, around the third.

I am the grandson of Mr.

Fred Rouse, who we are honoring, by naming the center, after he was a worker at the Swift company.

He was a father.

He was a husband.

He was a brother.

One day, getting off work.

He was beat, by strikers.

And they beat him to death.

They took him to the old City and County hospital.

A group of masked men came in, and they kidnaped him from the hospital.

Took him to, the land right there at the corner of 12th and Sammy.

And he was, brutally hung from a tree there.

It's kind of amazing and also ironic at the same time, too, that, you know, this building that was meant for hate and, you know, really striking fear in the community.

Now, it's being named after my grandfather.

We want the the building to remind us of what happened here.

But we also want a new project in the new building to tell people that, even though what happened here was horrible, that there is hope.

One of the ways we've approached the design of the building is wanting to make sure that there's a portion of this building that will remain as a scar that tells us about what happened here.

So we imagine kind of taking some of these walls out and leaving some of them in and having that those other new elements contrasting with what is in in the space as we're thinking about introducing new construction.

We are, considering how do we bring light and airiness to a building that right now feels very massive and heavy and grounded.

Most of us don't experience most buildings from the inside.

We drive by them, we walk by them.

But sometimes we only see the facade.

Architecture has a responsibility to communicate something, and we want this building and the architecture to be inviting, to let people know that this is a welcoming place where people will gather.

The thing is, once we go through these sometimes painful experiences of changing things or holding on to things, there is some division.

In the beginning it was done right.

This would become one of the things that people in Fort Worth will be most proud of.

I love the fact that Fred Rouse, his name, will be on this building, because his is a story that needs to be told.

We should never forget what happened to him.

And when we have, we have to own there.

45,019 21 A man was lynched, dragged out of a hospital bed and hung on a tree.

How do you take what is a painful chapter, by anybody's reckoning, and turn it into something that heals?

But this is one of the few, if not the only, remaining Klan purposed building, still standing, which gives it a unique place in American history because very few cities built something like this.

This building is for everybody.

You know, all races are religions are identities.

Everybody would be able to come and share in the amazing experience that they're going to have here.

Our Bible tells us, and we know of so many things that were evil that would turn into good things.

And so I'm just so sure.

1012 North Main is going to be fabulous for the whole community.