Between his high school graduation in 1946 and the summer of 1951, my grandfather never seemed to stay in one place for very long, enrolling variously at Bob Jones University, the famed evangelical school then located in Cleveland, Tennessee; at Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada; and at John Muir College in Pasadena, California, where he earned an associate’s degree in engineering in 1951. He left Bob Jones because of their racial discrimination in excluding black students from the university, but not before embarking on a mission assignment during summer break in 1947. He traveled to Vernal, Utah, where he worked as a seventeen-year-old missionary to the Ute Indians, and on September 8, 1947, he was baptized and ordained to the ministry by the pastor of the First Baptist Church there, both of them wading into a cold mountain stream so the pastor could fully immerse my grandfather beneath the running water—the true Baptist way.
His first taste of notoriety came when my grandfather was profiled in Time magazine in June 1951. He kept a framed print of the story on the wall of his office for as long as I can remember, and I read it often over the years, laughing at the image it painted of my twenty-one-year-old Gramps, unmistakable and utterly unchanged by the decades that had passed: stern-faced and pleading, holding an open Bible in one hand and gesticulating with the other.
Five-year-old John Muir College at Pasadena (enrollment: 2,000) has no more than the average quota of campus sin. But to Fred Phelps, 21, a tall (6 ft. 3 in.), craggy-faced engineering student from Meridian, Miss., John Muir is a weed-grown vineyard. Day after day this spring he has called upon his fellow students to repent. His method: to walk up to groups of boys and girls munching their lunchtime sandwiches in the quadrangle, ask “May I say a few words?” and launch into a talk. Fred Phelps’s talks drew crowds of up to 100. Over and over he denounced the “sins committed on campus by students and teachers … promiscuous petting … evil language … profanity … cheating … teachers’ filthy jokes in classrooms … pandering to the lusts of the flesh.” Such strictures sent Dr. Archie Turrell, principal of John Muir, and most of his faculty into a slow burn.
Every single move was classic Gramps. School officials ordered him to stop his on-campus ministry, both because they felt attacked and because he was in possible violation of California’s state education code, which forbade the teaching of religion on public school campuses. In response to their demands, he simply took it across the road, off campus, and kept at it. But Principal Turrell pursued him there, too: “He accosted me in very stern language, and told me that he would call the law. So I told him I had no fears. If the police arrested me I would preach to them in jail.” After police forced his growing audience to disperse and “invited” him into a police car to drive him away from the scene, the school suspended him—but he was back preaching from the lawn of a friendly neighbor the next week, now with “something of the attraction of a martyr.” And then this little gem: “Students were delighted with the story that Phelps had been ordered to consult the school psychologist, a middle-aged lady, and that he had turned the tables on her by ‘psychoanalyzing’ her.”
Each time I read the profile, I couldn’t help but laugh in fond recognition of the whole picture, familiar though it had happened long before even my mother existed. He wasn’t focused on the gay community in those days—LGBT rights hadn’t yet become a cultural touchstone—but this was unmistakably my grandfather: defiant, tenacious, and ultimately triumphant, calling out sin wherever he found it, fighting the powers that be to do what he believed was right, no matter what forces they brought to bear on him. Something of a martyr. Something of a hero.
Oh, how perfectly it seemed to capture my Gramps.
* * *
Five months after the profile was published, my grandfather was preaching in the chapel of the Arizona Bible Institute in Phoenix. He was introduced as “the young man from the Time magazine article,” and a considerable crowd had gathered to hear him speak—among them my grandmother, a twenty-six-year-old postgraduate music student who was working for the professor who’d invited him, Mr. Woods. She watched from the back of the room as he paced back and forth on the platform, guessing he must be thirty years old to be behaving so seriously. “It was the way he always got when he had to preach,” she told me later. “He’d get so sober it was scary. That’s the way he was.” I didn’t need to ask what she meant, because it was something that had never wavered. It was impossible to hear him speak from the pulpit without being overtaken by an almost paralyzing sense of gravity; these were matters of eternal import, and it was your never-dying soul that hung precariously in the balance. “He laid it on us for about ten or fifteen minutes. I mean, he didn’t hardly breathe … It was just shocking, it got everybody’s attention.” Mrs. Woods slipped in the back during my grandfather’s presentation and told her, “I want you to pay attention to that young man, and be nice to him.” Mrs. Woods was an Italian lady, and she was matchmaking, Gran chuckled later. But at the time, her only thought was, What young man? It didn’t occur to her that Mrs. Woods was referring to the man onstage.
They both remembered that she had an apple in her hand when he first saw her, shortly after they’d left the chapel. Biting into the apple, she practically ran right into him coming around a corner. “Are you Margie, ma’am?” he asked in his Southern drawl, and launched into another talk about how Mrs. Woods had told him all about her, how highly she thought of her. Gran was a transplant from rural Missouri, and the praise embarrassed her Midwestern sensibilities.
They saw each other several more times in the next few weeks. First at one of the school’s street meetings in downtown Phoenix, when Gran was on her way to sing at a wedding. Then Gramps gave her a ride to get her driver’s license. After that there was the New Year’s Eve party, where he said he first really noticed her, sitting at the piano with her back to the keys, singing along with all the others in an aqua-colored dress, looking radiant. When it came time for my grandfather to preach every night for two weeks at a church in nearby Glendale, she’d catch the bus to see him, and he’d drive her home afterward, taking circuitous routes so they could talk a bit more—about the Bible, mostly. “He didn’t go very long without talking about some verse … He just had Bible verses rolling out of him.” This part of the story took me aback when I first heard it; such behavior would certainly be characterized as the appearance of evil in the strict operation Gramps was running at Westboro. A boy and a girl in a car together alone, without a chaperone? For shame. When my grandmother would get home, she’d dissect the whole evening with Mrs. Woods, who told her, “Well, he’s gonna ask you to marry him when this is over.” The last church meeting was a Saturday afternoon, just before Gramps was set to head back to Mississippi for more preaching. He told her he had something for her in the glove compartment, and did she want to see what it was? She opened it up and found the ring. Many years later, when my sisters and I asked her what she thought in that moment, she said, “I didn’t have anybody—and Mrs. Woods was all excited about it. She thought it was wonderful. She was my dearest friend. I never had a friend like her. And she—and I thought that’d be just fine. That it would probably work out okay. That’s all I thought.
“I guess I was kinda scared. I mean, what was happening—I didn’t know if I wanted to or not. Well, it’s a funny feeling: you gotta make a decision, and you don’t feel like you’re prepared to make a decision. Well, I couldn’t think of any reason why not.
“I had no idea.”
* * *
My grandfather’s proposal was in January, and he returned to Arizona in time for the wedding on May 15, 1952. Less than a year later, their first child was born—a son named Fred Jr. My grandfather continued his work as a traveling preacher during the first two years of their marriage, leaving his wife and young boy at home. I never learned why they chose to leave the Southwest, but leave they did, in search of a place to settle down. Their first stop: Topeka, Kansas. Gramps took it as a sign from God that the trio had ar
rived in Topeka on the day that the decision in the Brown case was published—a sign that he should stay in Kansas’s capital city and work for the righteous cause of the civil rights movement. He found a steady ministerial position, too: the East Side Baptist Church was looking for a preacher to lead a new church on the other side of town—Westboro Baptist Church. In those early days, my grandfather’s fire-and-brimstone sermons were pretty typical of the era—but his preaching would grow ever more radical over the years, eventually causing East Side to cut ties with Westboro. The church’s reputation as being a proponent of hate wouldn’t develop until the launch of the picketing campaign at Gage Park, but for East Side, the breaking point came many years earlier. My grandfather’s growing certainty in the righteousness of his every belief made him unwilling to yield to another perspective on any matter.
My grandmother was seven months pregnant by the time they moved to Topeka in 1954—their second child in as many years, establishing a pattern that would continue for several more. Between 1953 and 1965, the only year without a birth was 1960. There were thirteen in all, with the youngest an outlier, born in 1968 when Gran was nearing her forty-third birthday. Fred Jr., Mark, Katherine, Margie, Shirley, Nathan, Jonathan, Rebekah, Elizabeth, Timothy, Dortha, Rachel, and Abigail. Eight girls and five boys. In addition to his ministry work, my grandfather sold insurance, vacuum cleaners, and baby strollers to support his ever-growing family. He also attended Washburn University School of Law, and by the time he graduated in 1964, he had been both editor of the law journal and captain of the moot court team.
In my teens and twenties, I would listen as my mother recounted the stories of her father’s decades of civil rights work—not just to my siblings and me, but to journalists, to students at universities and high schools across the country, even to international law enforcement executives attending the FBI National Academy at Quantico. It was a privilege to be her assistant and travel companion, to be present to hear interlocutors push for details I hadn’t thought to ask for. My mother would describe the early years of her father’s legal career, how one of his first cases out of law school had been to represent a group of black students from the University of Kansas who’d been arrested for staging a sit-in—among them Pro Football Hall of Fame legend Gale Sayers, a celebrated running back who joined the National Football League in 1965 as a first round draft pick for the Chicago Bears. She praised her father’s work ethic, the brilliance with which he’d represented his clients, how distinct and effective his courtroom strategy had been, and how intimidated opposing attorneys were to face him. She waxed lyrical about the importance of the work he did—work that came at enormous personal cost to my grandfather and his young family. At a time when Topeka was still “a Jim Crow town” where “nobody was effectuating civil rights,” a city that wasn’t about to take school integration and black equality without putting up a fight to maintain the old banners of white supremacy, the Phelps family suffered. “People would call on the phone, screaming ‘nigger lover!’ and carrying on, death threats and so forth. Over and over, we had our buildings shot up, cars shot up…” Uncle Tim, my mom’s youngest brother and a shy redheaded kid at the time, had been beaten up more than once at school and as he’d walked home.
None of it moved my grandfather, not the violence or threats of violence, not the backlash, not the unrelenting opposition from the legal community. None of it moved him an inch off his mark. In his view, racism was the great sin of society during that part of his life, and I imagine he quoted the same verses to steel himself in the face of that opposition as he did later, during our fight against LGBT rights: Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, and thy forehead strong against their foreheads. As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks. Not only did he continue that work himself for more than two decades, but he required that my mother and her siblings join him, each one as soon as they were able—and whether they liked it or not. By the late 1980s, he had received the Omaha Mayor’s Special Recognition Award, an award from the Greater Kansas City Chapter of Blacks in Government, and another from the Bonner Springs chapter of the NAACP for his “undauntedness” and his “steely determination for justice during his tenure as a civil rights attorney.”
My father first got a camcorder back in 1988 so he could film home movies: our bedtime stories, the cookie-making operations he’d lead in Mom’s absence, and enthusiastic renditions of “I’m a Little Teapot” and Winnie-the-Pooh Sing-Alongs. Among the very earliest of that footage is a speech my grandfather gave on April 4, 1988, at an event sponsored by the Kansas Committee to Free Southern Africa. Organized to oppose apartheid in South Africa, the event took place at a local black church and featured remarks by a county commissioner, the president of the Topeka Public Schools board of education, the state treasurer, Topeka’s deputy mayor, a state representative, and the Kansas Attorney General. When Gramps approached the podium, he brought with him a copy of the United States Reports, Volume 60, containing the opinion passed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott case, which held that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and as such could not claim rights guaranteed to citizens. My grandfather spoke eloquently against the “de facto bondage” of blacks in South Africa, and of the moral outrage of the white supremacy espoused in the Dred Scott decision. He quoted the opinion at some length, which described blacks as “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Full of righteous indignation, my grandfather’s voice reached its crescendo as he read the Court’s assertion that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” He could hardly contain his shame and disgust for the black-robed justices who’d written such words. “Eighty-four years after Lord Mansfield, with the stroke of his pen, set all the blacks in England free, we’re over here like some stone-age barbarians writin’ our cockeyed Supreme Court opinions about black people—you oughta know this!”
Decades later, CNN would interview leaders in the black community who’d known my grandfather during his days as a civil rights attorney:
Jack Alexander, a Topeka native and civil rights activist, says the Brown decision opened the door for discrimination suits. Phelps would take cases in the 1960s that other lawyers, black and white, wouldn’t touch, he says. “Back in that era, most black attorneys were busy trying to make a living,” says Alexander, who became the first black elected in the city of Topeka, as a member of the Topeka City Commission. “They couldn’t take those cases on the chance they wouldn’t get paid. But Fred was taking those cases.” Phelps was so successful that he became the first lawyer blacks would call when they thought they were being discriminated against, says the NAACP’s [Rev. Ben] Scott.
The more details I learned of the first wave of my grandfather’s war on the city of Topeka, the more my heart swelled with pride for him and for our family. This was our legacy. In spite of all the vicious words spoken against us, there could be no question as to the twin evils of racial discrimination and white supremacy. There could be no question that my family had been on the noble side of that dispute. History had proved us right. That Topekans would hate us for it seemed like dispositive evidence of just how morally bankrupt our city truly was.
* * *
This glowing portrait of my family, courageously taking up arms in the battle against evil, was first called into question by my unwitting adversaries online. I was thirteen when the Internet first became part of my daily life, and one of my favorite things to do around this time was to argue Bible doctrines with strangers in the chat room on GodHatesFags.com—at least until I’d be unceremoniously kicked offline by our temperamental dial-up connection. The Topeka Capital Journal website was another frequent destination, as it maintained now-defunct message boards where I could pose as an objective observer and mount anonymous defenses of Westboro.
I learned early to ignore th
e casual insults they tossed around—“hateful,” “evil,” “monsters,” “stupid”—for the simple fact that I knew my family. Not only did these descriptors fail to capture the essence of the people I knew and loved, they were diametrically opposed to it. Nearly all of the adults in my orbit were college graduates, many with postgraduate degrees in law, business, and public administration. Whether they chose to pursue work in health care, corrections, or information technology, their careers flourished. They were natural comedians, clever and creative, and I’d often laugh myself to tears listening to outrageous stories they’d spin and parodies they’d write. My daily existence was a living testimony against the slanders hurled at my family, and made it easy to dismiss the accusers as liars who could not be trusted in any context.
Unfollow Page 6