Fort Worth’s hulking former Ku Klux Klan auditorium, once a stage for white supremacy, is inching closer to an entirely different future as the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing. Organizers say the reparative-justice arts hub is designed to flip the script on a symbol of terror and turn it into a home for performance, learning and community gatherings. After years of arguing over whether the building should be demolished or saved, the coalition behind the project says it has moved into detailed design and early pre-construction while public debate continues across the city.
What's planned at the Fred Rouse Center
The team behind the project envisions the center as part history lesson, part cultural engine. Plans include galleries that confront the building’s Klan past and broader North Texas race relations, a theater with rehearsal studios, classrooms, and an outdoor amphitheater and park. The proposal also includes affordable live/work units for artists, a makerspace, and meeting rooms that can host trainings and restorative programs, according to Transform 1012.
Design, timeline and funding
Project leaders say design is now anchored by a locally led team, and that selective demolition and structural work began last year to stabilize the shell for new construction. Current estimates have full construction starting in the second quarter of 2027, with an anticipated buildout of about 18 months. To get there, organizers are chasing a mix of grants and private donations to fill a significant budget gap, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Community process and the debate
From the outset, Transform 1012 has tried to keep the community in the driver’s seat. Organizers have hosted conversations with neighbors, descendants and cultural groups that wrestle with two big questions: whether the hall should stand at all, and, if it does, how its history should be interpreted. “How can we use this space that was used to teach hate into a place to teach understanding, to teach love, to teach healing?” Executive Director Carlos Gonzalez‑Jaime asked in an interview, underscoring the coalition’s listening-first approach, according to Axios.
A national trend
Fort Worth is not alone in trying to figure out what to do with painful landmarks. In Laurens, S.C., the Echo Project converted a once-segregated theater that later housed a KKK museum into an anti-hate education center, per the National Park Service. In Fredericksburg, officials removed the city’s slave auction block from a downtown corner and moved it to a museum, and are now designing a memorial for the original site, according to Fredericksburg. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center has purchased the Mississippi barn connected to Till’s 1955 murder to preserve it as a place for reflection and learning, as reported by Mississippi Today. Together, those efforts highlight different paths: restoration with heavy historical context, relocation to museums, and preservation as solemn memorials, each carrying its own set of tensions.
What to watch next
Transform 1012 plans more community meetings this summer and fall before locking in schematic designs. If construction begins on the current schedule, backers say the Fred Rouse Center could open in late 2028 or early 2029. How quickly fundraising comes together, what emerges from public design reviews, and how the coalition ultimately shapes interpretation and programming will determine whether the project lands as a unifying civic asset or remains a lightning rod.
For many Fort Worth residents, the fight over the building is about more than bricks and mortar. Organizers describe the center as an attempt to reclaim a story and return resources and cultural power to the very communities the Klan sought to terrorize. The coming months of outreach, fundraising and design decisions will reveal whether that ambitious promise can become reality.
