Fred Waldron Phelps Sr. (November 13, 1929 – March 19, 2014) was an American minister and disbarred lawyer who served as the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, worked as a civil rights attorney, and ran for statewide election in Kansas. A divisive and controversial figure, he gained national attention for his homophobic views and protests near the funerals of gay people, AIDS victims, military veterans, and disaster victims whom he believed were killed as a result of God punishing the U.S. for having "bankrupt values" and tolerating homosexuality. Phelps founded the Westboro Baptist Church, a Topeka, Kansas-based independent Primitive Baptist congregation, in 1955. It has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America". Its signature slogan, "God Hates Fags", remains the name of the group's principal website.
In addition to funerals, Phelps and his followers—mostly his own immediate family members—picketed gay pride gatherings, high-profile political events, university commencement ceremonies, live performances of The Laramie Project, and functions sponsored by mainstream Christian groups with which he had no affiliation, arguing it was their sacred duty to warn others of God's anger. He continued doing so in the face of numerous legal challenges—some of which reached the U.S. Supreme Court—and near-universal opposition and contempt from other religious groups and the general public. Laws enacted at both the federal and state levels for the specific purpose of curtailing his disruptive activities were limited in their effectiveness due to the Constitutional protections afforded to Phelps under the First Amendment.
Gay rights supporters denounced him as a producer of anti-gay propaganda and violence-inspiring hate speech, and even Christians from fundamentalist denominations distanced themselves from him. In particular, Phelps and his church routinely targeted the Catholic Church with picket signs and online websites claiming that "priests rape boys" and "fag priests" and focusing on the Catholic Church sex scandals, calling the pope "The Godfather of pedophiles". Although Phelps died in 2014, the Westboro Baptist Church remains in operation. It continues to conduct regular demonstrations outside movie theaters, universities, government buildings, and other facilities in Topeka and elsewhere, and is still characterized as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Fred Waldron Phelps was born on November 13, 1929, in Meridian, Mississippi, the elder of two children of Catherine Idalette (née Johnston) and Fred Wade Phelps. His father was a railroad policeman for the Columbus and Greenville Railway and a devout Methodist; his mother was a homemaker. Catherine Phelps died of esophageal cancer in 1935 at the age of 28. Her aunt, Irene Jordan, helped care for Fred and his younger sister Martha Jean until December 1944, when his father married Olive Briggs, a 39-year-old woman who was divorced.
Fred distinguished himself scholastically and was an Eagle Scout. He also was a member of Phi Kappa, a high school social fraternity, president of the Young Peoples Department of Central United Methodist Church and was honored as the best drilled member of the Mississippi Junior State Guard, a unit similar to the Reserve Officer Training Corps. He graduated from Meridian High School at 16 years old, ranking sixth in his graduating class of 213 students, and was the class orator at his commencement. After graduating from high school he received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point; but after attending a tent revival meeting, decided to pursue a religious calling instead.
In September 1947, at the age of 17, he was ordained a Southern Baptist minister and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, to attend Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina). A combination of Phelps's refusal of the West Point appointment (which his father had worked hard to obtain), his abandonment of his father's beloved Methodist faith, and his father's remarriage to a divorced woman (Phelps would later become an outspoken critic of divorce) precipitated a lifelong estrangement from his father and stepmother—and by some accounts, from his sister as well. Phelps apparently never spoke to his family members again, and returned all of their letters and birthday cards, as well as Christmas gifts for his children, unopened.
Phelps dropped out of Bob Jones College in 1948. He moved to California and became a street preacher while attending John Muir College in Pasadena. The June 11, 1951 issue of Time magazine included a story on Phelps, who lectured fellow students about "sins committed on campus by students and teachers", including "promiscuous petting, evil language, profanity, cheating, teachers' filthy jokes in classrooms, and pandering to the lusts of the flesh." When the college ordered him to stop, citing a California law that forbade the teaching of religion on any public school campus, he moved his sermons across the street. In October 1951, Phelps met Margie Marie Simms in Arizona and married her in May 1952.
In 1954, Phelps, his pregnant wife, and their newborn son moved to Topeka, Kansas, where he was hired by the East Side Baptist Church as an associate pastor. The following year, the church's leadership opened Westboro Baptist Church on the other side of town, and Phelps became its pastor.
Although the new church was ostensibly Independent Baptist, Phelps preached a doctrine very similar to that of the Primitive Baptists, who believe in scriptural literalism — that Christian biblical scripture is literally true — and that only a predetermined number of people selected for redemption before the world was created will be saved on Judgment Day. His vitriolic preaching alienated church leaders and most of the original congregation, who either returned to East Side Baptist or joined other congregations, leaving him with a small following consisting almost entirely of his own relatives and close friends.
Phelps was forced to support himself selling vacuum cleaners, baby strollers, and insurance; later, some of his 13 children were reportedly compelled to sell candy door-to-door for several hours each day. In 1972, two companies sued Westboro Baptist for failing to pay for the candy being peddled by the children.
Phelps earned a law degree from Washburn University in 1964, and founded the Phelps Chartered law firm. In 1969, upon a finding of professional misconduct, authorities suspended him from practicing as a lawyer for two years.
Phelps' second notable cases were related to civil rights, and his involvement in civil rights cases in and around Kansas gained him praise from local African-American leaders.
"I systematically brought down the Jim Crow laws of this town", he claimed. Phelps' daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper was quoted as saying, "We took on the Jim Crow establishment, and Kansas did not take that sitting down. They used to shoot our car windows out, screaming we were nigger lovers." She added that the Phelps law firm made up one-third of the state's federal docket of civil rights cases.
Phelps took cases on behalf of African-American clients alleging racial discrimination by school systems, and a predominantly black American Legion post which had been raided by police, alleging racially based police abuse. Phelps' law firm obtained settlements for some clients.
Johnson v. Topeka Board of Education, et al.
Phelps' national notoriety first came from a 1973 lawsuit (settled in 1978) on behalf of a 10-year-old African-American plaintiff, Evelyn Renee Johnson (some sources say Evelyn Rene Johnson), against the Topeka Board of Education (which had, in 1954, famously lost the pivotal racial discrimination case of Brown v. Board of Education, ending legal racial segregation in U.S. public schools), and against related local, state and federal officials. In the 1973 case, Phelps argued that the Topeka Board of Education, in violation of the 1954 ruling, had not yet made its schools equal, and by attending Topeka's east-side, predominantly minority schools, the black plaintiff had received an inferior education.