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 arrived 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