A former Ku Klux Klan hall in Fort Worth, Texas, is being turned into an arts and community center as communities across the U.S. wrestle with historic sites tied to racism, slavery and white supremacy. The building once stood as a threat to Black Americans, Latinos and Catholic and Jewish immigrants. Now advocates want it to serve something else entirely: performances, history, organizing and community healing.
Who Gets to Control the Story
Supporters of the Fort Worth project say the former KKK Klavern No. 101 auditorium will become an arts and community center named after a Black lynching victim. They describe it as a reparative justice project, a direct answer to a building that once helped enforce terror from above. The choice is blunt. Leave the structure as a monument to hate, tear it down, or take it over and make it useful to the people it was meant to intimidate.
That fight is playing out in other places too. In Laurens, S.C., a former segregated theater that later housed a KKK museum was remade as the Echo Project, an antihate education center. In Fredericksburg, Va., officials moved a slave auction block from a downtown street corner to a museum and are planning a memorial at the original site. In New Orleans, a former segregated school has become the Tate Etienne & Prevost Center, with civil rights exhibits, antiracism groups and affordable senior housing. In Drew, Miss., the Emmett Till Interpretive Center is transforming the barn where 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955 into a memorial and place for reflection.
These aren’t abstract debates. They’re fights over who gets to define public memory, and who has to live with the wreckage.
What People at the Bottom Are Doing
Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said the barn acquisition forced his community to confront a site many people would rather avoid and to replace decades of silence with restorative justice. “We have to sit with the worst of our humanity,” Weems said. “We’re not going to let this be erased. We’re not going to let the murderers who wanted this to be erased (and) get away with that.”
Carlos Gonzalez-Jaime, executive director of Transform 1012 N. Main Street, said, “We cannot erase history. We should not delete history, because we need to learn from it.” He said Transform 1012’s first step was listening to communities targeted by white supremacy as well as those who wanted the former Klan hall torn down. “How can we use this space that was used to teach hate into a place to teach understanding, to teach love, to teach healing?” Gonzalez-Jaime said.
That’s the real work here: not the polished language of institutions, but communities trying to reclaim spaces built to degrade them. The projects described in the article lean on organizing, memory and public use, not the usual top-down script of officials deciding what the public should remember.
The Federal Machine Wants a Cleaner Myth
The clash has sharpened as the Trump administration pushes federal sites and national parks toward a more “uplifting” version of American history. A 2025 executive order by President Trump directed federal cultural institutions and Interior Department sites to remove or revise what it cast as divisive or anti-American content, often interpreted as references to the nation’s era of slavery. A federal judge ordered the administration to restore national park materials removed under the directive, but an appeals court later allowed the removals to continue while the legal fight plays out.
That’s the state doing what states do: narrowing the story, sanding down the violence, and calling it unity. The order doesn’t erase the past so much as it tries to manage it, keeping the public square safe for patriotic branding while communities are left to deal with the real history on their own.
Saving sites associated with some of the nation’s worst episodes of racism can feel like boosting white supremacy, while destroying them can erase evidence of what happened. Stone Mountain, Ga., remains an especially difficult case. It is both a public park and home to the nation’s largest Confederate carving, which includes Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. State law protects the carving, while park officials and advocates have pushed for new exhibits on slavery, segregation and the mountain’s KKK ties. Confederate heritage groups have sued over efforts to add that context.
Rashad Robinson, a social justice strategist and author of “From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter — and Win,” said communities have an opportunity to create new civic symbols rather than simply preserving or tearing down racist landmarks. Robinson said movements should invest in places that reflect their values rather than allowing the past to define them.
The struggle over these sites isn’t just about old buildings. It’s about whether power gets to keep writing history in its own image, or whether people targeted by that power can force open space for memory, grief and something less obedient.