Westboro's 'Church of Hate' Leader Once Championed Civil Rights

Fred Phelps has been testing America's laws -- and patience -- for years, long before the Supreme Court today gave his anti-gay church group the OK to protest its gospel of hate at military funerals.

But in the beginning, Phelps, now the 80-year-old pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, had a very different cause -- civil rights. Before the bombastic, Kansas-based preacher began picketing high-profile funerals with signs like, "God Hates Fags" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," he was a prominent civil-rights attorney known for waging successful anti-discrimination suits in Topeka.

Phelps argued in a 1979 class-action suit against the Topeka school district that the district's segregation had engendered within black students "feelings of inferiority as to their status in the community, thus affecting their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone," according to The Topeka Capital-Journal.

In 1987, Phelps received an award from a local branch of the NAACP, for exhibiting a "steely determination for justice during his tenure as a civil rights attorney."

Today, though, Phelps is far better known as the head of the Westboro Baptist Church, an independent group of fewer than 100 members, recognized by the IRS as a church but widely thought to be mostly made up of Phelps' extended family.

In fact, many say the Phelps family and the church are one and the same. Eleven of the pastor's 13 adult children are lawyers, according to a 1999 profile of Phelps in Mother Jones magazine. And all but four of the children have remained loyal to their father and taken up his cause.

"He's a focused, determined, no-nonsense keeper of his flock," Anthony Karen, a Life.com photographer who shot the group last year, said of Phelps.

Many Americans first heard of Westboro in 1998, when the church picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who was tortured and killed because he was gay. The signs, which read, "God Hates Fags," sparked outrage across the country, but the church's crusade didn't end there.

The church famously showed up again at the 2006 funeral of Matthew Snyder, a U.S. Marine who died in Iraq. "Thank God for dead soldiers," one sign read. ''You're Going to Hell," another said. Snyder's father sued the church, but the Supreme Court today ruled 8-1 that the group is protected under the First Amendment.

In the past decade, the church has proved itself adept at generating media coverage, picketing funerals and closely watched events such as:

• Productions of "The Laramie Project," a play about Shepard
• The 2007 funeral of conservative Christian preacher Jerry Falwell
• The 2010 memorial service for Elizabeth Edwards

Even the group's website, "Godhatesfags.com," seems to be designed in the spirit of provocation. And in recent years, the church has began railing against Jews as well, and has begun protesting synagogues across the country.

One of Phelps' estranged children says Phelps, who started the church in 1955 along with his wife, Margie, was always filled with hate.

"He only started picketing in 1991, but I want people to understand that nothing's changed, he's been like this all along," Dortha Bird, who changed her surname, told the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Intelligence Report" in 2001. She, along with her brother Nate Phelps, said their father was viciously abusive toward his children and wife.

Last May, Nate Phelps said his father beat them with a barber's strap and the handle of a mattock, a farm tool.

"It's about 4 feet long and it's a solid, long, heavy piece of wood," Phelps told ABC News. "He would go down the back of the legs and up to the lower back, and when he was really angry and raging he would use it to hit you with the arms. On one occasion I can remember being hit with it in the head and it split my scalp."

Amid varied reactions to the Supreme Court ruling today, free speech advocates praised the decision but only members of the Westboro Baptist Church seemed to rejoice.

"Supreme Ct. Rules 8-1 in favor of Westboro Baptist Church in Snyder v. Phelps!! Praise God!! U wanted us shut up - God wants us to cry aloud," Steve Drain, a church member, wrote on Twitter.

Phelps did not immediately return a request for comment today by AOL News.