The owner of a Fort Worth bar said he's taking down a sign that reads "Shut up [N-word]" after two customers shared pictures of the slur on Facebook.

James Emerson, owner of Jim's Rodeo Tavern on Azle Avenue, said the sign was meant as a memorial for a frequent customer who died in 2016.

A sign at Jim's Rodeo Tavern in Fort Worth. (Owen McGrath)

Photos of the sign posted Monday by Owen McGrath and Jesse Bunting — who run another bar in the area — show text that reads "RIP Teresa Kidwell" beneath the racial slur, along with "1-5-16," the date of her death.

A newspaper obituary for Kidwell shows the photo of a white woman.

Emerson said that the phrase was Kidwell's favorite and that she used it with everyone, including whites.

"It was kind of a joke," he said. "It was never indicative of anything racial."

Bunting, who owns a nearby bar named Jesse's 50/Fifty, said he and McGrath, the bar manager, had gone to Jim's Rodeo Tavern for beers Monday afternoon when McGrath noticed the sign. He tapped Bunting on the leg to draw his attention to it.

"I got very uncomfortable very quickly," McGrath said. "I took a picture because I couldn't believe it was there."

It was McGrath's first trip to the bar, but Bunting said he hadn't noticed the sign during previous visits.

Emerson said the sign has been in place for more than two years.

McGrath said that Bunting asked the bartender, "Hey, what's up with the sign?" but that she shrugged it off. The friends said they finished their beers and left without saying anything more about the slur.

McGrath said he was worried that he could face harm or prejudice as a gay man if he began a confrontation.

"That's the only reason I didn't say anything in the moment," he said. "I don't want to put myself in that situation in case that's an issue."

Jesse Bunting, owner of Jesse's 50/Fifty bar in Fort Worth, took a photo of a sign with a racial slur at another bar, Jim's Rodeo Tavern, on Monday. (Jesse Bunting)

Bunting said he just wanted to get out of the bar. He and McGrath decided to share the sign on their personal Facebook accounts Monday.

"At first we didn't plan on putting it on the internet or anything," Bunting said. "We just talked about it, and we felt the service community in the area should know this, so if they plan to go there or even apply for a job there, they would know what was posted."

Emerson said that many of his customers are Hispanic, and that he hadn't had any trouble with the sign.

"Everybody's welcome there," he said, "and we've never had that complaint."

The slur — derived from the French and Spanish words for "black" — has long been used to belittle black people. But Emerson said he was told the N-word meant "worthless person."

The owner of Jim's Rodeo Tavern said he wishes Bunting and McGrath had complained to him or one of his employees about the sign.

"We're in competition with them," Emerson said. "We have a good clientele. We have good people. We have few, if any, problems. ... To my knowledge, they're just out to make trouble."

Emerson said no one had contacted him about the sign until a reporter called Tuesday. He vowed to remove it when he got to work in the afternoon.

"If they had said something, we would have understood that it was bothersome to them, and we would have taken it down," he said.

McGrath fought back against the view that they're competitors out to get Jim's Rodeo Tavern. He said he and Bunting patronize other local bars as a sign of support.

"This isn't a situation of us trying to mess with their business," he said. "This is a situation of us seeing something that we feel really strongly about, something that's wildly inappropriate to us."

Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard embodies South Dallas' decline — and the struggle to rise above it