J. Frank Norris rose to fame as the controversial fundamentalist pastor of America’s first megachurch, the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. He used his pulpit, his newspaper and his radio station to battle his enemies in unscrupulous ways, and when one angry local businessman named Dexter Chipps marched into his office in July of 1926 to confront him about his tactics, Norris pulled out a gun and shot him dead.
My guest, David R. Stokes, is an ordained minister, broadcaster and author, and he talks in detail about Norris’s rise to religious stardom, his use of sensationalist sermons to attract membership, his sordid association with the Ku Klux Klan, and the dramatic courtroom spectacle that followed this infamous Texas slaying.
His book is called “Apparent Danger: The Pastor of America’s First Megachurch and the Texas Murder Trial of the Decade in the 1920s”. Moore information can be found at his website: davidstokeslive.wordpress.com
