Kansas attorney and civil rights leader Fred Phelps is remembered today as a tough-as-nails civil rights attorney in Kansas, the land of Brown vs. Board of Education, and like many civil rights leaders, he was taken well before his time when a car bomb killed him and three of his children in 1981. That car bomb was linked to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the leaders of the attack are still in prison to this day.
Phelps was a controversial man, regarded as a difficult man to get along with and carrying some rigid and unyielding religious views. However, his clients regarded him as an effective attorney, essentially the Civil Rights movement's greatest anti-hero. Today a scholarship for aspiring legal minds bears his name, as does the Fred Phelps Civil Rights Clinic in Topeka.
However, he was in some legal trouble before his death and was facing disbarment. It's hard to say if he would have been able to keep practicing or how he would be remembered had his life not been cut tragically short.
Phelps was a controversial man, regarded as a difficult man to get along with and carrying some rigid and unyielding religious views. However, his clients regarded him as an effective attorney, essentially the Civil Rights movement's greatest anti-hero. Today a scholarship for aspiring legal minds bears his name, as does the Fred Phelps Civil Rights Clinic in Topeka.
However, he was in some legal trouble before his death and was facing disbarment. It's hard to say if he would have been able to keep practicing or how he would be remembered had his life not been cut tragically short.