Fred Phelps was born in Mississippi in 1929. By all accounts his childhood was tragic: his father worked on the railroads during the Great Depression and his mother died of cancer when he was five, leaving his aunt to raise him. Despite this, Nate says he and his siblings were told that their father was a star pupil, a Golden Gloves boxer and an Eagle Scout, the highest rank attainable, albeit one some people remembered as having an “antagonistic bent”. Fred met Margie Simms, Nate’s mother, in 1952 while they were both attending the Arizona Bible Institute. Twelve years later he graduated with a law degree from a university in Kansas and fought various civil rights suits in the Sixties. According to local reports, he gained a reputation as a sharp, competent attorney “whose eloquent and fiery orations mesmerised juries”. Two decades later, he received awards from the Greater Kansas City Chapter of Blacks in Government and a local branch of the human rights group the NAACP.