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