John Franklyn Norris (September 18, 1877 – August 20, 1952) was a Baptist preacher and controversial Christian fundamentalist. Biography J. Frank Norris was born in Dadeville in Tallapoosa County in eastern Alabama, but the family shortly moved to Arkansas and then back to Columbiana in Shelby County in central Alabama. In the late 1880s, the Norrises purchased land near Hubbard in Hill County, Texas, about thirty miles north of Waco, where they farmed. James Warner Norris was an alcoholic, and Frank Norris claimed that his father once beat him severely after he had emptied his liquor bottles. In 1891, both were shot by an acquaintance of Warner Norris, and Frank said he did not fully recuperate for three years. Norris was converted at a Baptist revival meeting in the early 1890s, and in 1897, he became pastor of Mount Antioch Baptist Church in Mount Calm in Hill County, Texas. The following year he enrolled in Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, which he attended from 1898 to 1903. He then earned a Master of Theology degree from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1905, Norris returned to Texas as the pastor of the McKinney Avenue Baptist Church in Dallas. He resigned that post in 1907 to become editor of the Baptist Standard. Norris is credited with ending the Texas Baptist newspaper war, with moving Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from Waco to Fort Worth, and with persuading the state legislature to abolish racetrack gambling. In 1909, Norris sold his interest in the Baptist Standard and accepted the pastorate of the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, where he served for forty-four years until his death. In 1912, Norris was acquitted of arson and perjury charges related to fires that respectively destroyed his church auditorium and severely damaged his home. A second fire razed the structure in 1929, and rebuilding began at the advent of the Great Depression. Norris was also the radio pastor of, variously, KFQB, KTAT and then KSAT (not to be confused with KTSA and KSAT-TV, both in San Antonio), where he started the first regular radio ministry in the United States in the 1920s. The height of Norris' career came in the 1920s, when he became the leader of the fundamentalist movement in Texas by attacking the teaching of "that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution" at Baylor University. Because of his attacks on