James Austin Norris

James Austin Norris was born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 1893 and spent much of his early life in Pittsburgh. He received a bachelor's degree from Lincoln University in 1912 and graduated from the Yale Law School in 1917. He served in the military during WWI, and in 1919, he moved to Philadelphia, where he worked as an attorney and founded and edited the Black newspaper the Philadelphia American.

He was active in Philadelphia politics and government, campaigning for Franklin D. Roosevelt and becoming Philadelphia’s first Black ward leader. In 1937, he was the first Black appointee to the Board of Revision of Taxes, a position he held for 30 years.

In the 1920s, he was chief counsel for Marcus Garvey. In 1955, he became a partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Norris, Schmidt, Green, Harris, Higginbotham, and Associates, which focused in part on civil rights cases. Norris was known as a national expert in eminent domain law. He was married to Marie Norris and had two children. His daughter, Jetta Norris Jones, graduated from Yale Law School in 1950. James Austin Norris died in 1976.