Fight On, My Soul is a just-released biography of an African-American country doctor, Morgan E. Norris, M.D., who practiced medicine in Jim Crow Virginia, 1917-1964. Written by Morgan’s son James E.C. Norris, also a physician, it chronicles the life of a fearless and indomitable man. The author deftly interweaves his father’s saga with the political, cultural and sociological turmoil that only a minority of Americans living today experienced. Those who did not have the experiences hardly understand what life in the South in the first half of the twentieth century was about. The book illuminates this dark period with abundant clarity.

Meticulously researched, Fight On, My Soul adds an important documentary to the body of material on American history. It is a thorough recount of the experiences of an African-American physician in the rural South during the early and mid-twentieth century.

Motherless at age three and fatherless at age seventeen, Morgan was poor, hardly educated, and even had survived a childhood bout with tuberculosis. In 1900, the US Census Bureau classified him as a laborer. By 1917 he had gotten a college education, a medical degree and internship, and returned to that remote corner of Virginia called Lancaster County. (Lancaster County, Virginia, is one of the five counties in the Northern Neck – the northern-most peninsula. It is located between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers with the Chesapeake Bay on its eastern boundary.)

For the next 49 years Norris let no cause go unchallenged, no need unmet. Fight On, My Soul, a narrative that flows chronologically and topically, is engaging and provocative. The story evokes sadness, outrage, poignancy and even humor.

"Dr. Norris the younger has addressed topics by chapter and, with the aid of a good written record and sound research, clearly laid out the various challenges that his father, Dr. Norris the elder, met head on. The biography is a story of determination and success. It is a cogent history of an era that contemporary Virginians must find painful to read about; and this history is new and astonishing to younger readers….. And most of all it demonstrates that no matter what the odds, any individual with intelligence, determination and patience can both find individual success and create a legacy of having improved not only himself, but his world as well." Elsa Cooke Verbyla, Gloucester-Mathews Gazette Journal, December 10, 2009

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Registration: 5:30 — 6:00 PM
Program: 6:00 — 7:00 PM

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James Ellsworth Chiles Norris was born and reared in Lancaster County, Virginia. He graduated from Lancaster County’s A.T Wright High School in 1949. As a youngster, he had two hobbies - building and photography. Using his photographic skills, at age fifteen, he began helping his father, Morgan E. Norris, M.D., by taking and developing X-rays. Fascinated by the x-ray images and the medical texts in his father’s extensive library, he knew by age 16 that he wanted to be a doctor. He graduated from Hampton Institute (now University) (1953), Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland (1957) and interned at Grasslands Hospital in Westchester County, New York.

Norris returned home in 1958 to work with his father but within a year, he was off to Melbourne, Florida to practice on his own. After a stint of family practice he became a general surgeon. He was drafted to serve in the United States Navy in 1967 at age 35 and was assigned to the U. S. Naval Hospital, St. Albans, New York and with the First Marine Division in Danang, South Vietnam. Upon discharge from the Navy, he was appointed Chief of Surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Tuskegee, Alabama.

Norris entered plastic surgery training at the University of Michigan in 1972. In plastic surgery, he combined his three interests: building (reconstructing damaged and deformed bodies), practicing medicine and taking photographs. From 1974 – 1987 he was director of the Burn Unit at Harlem Hospital Center and he was an Attending in Plastic Surgery at the St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital from 1981-1997. He is board-certified in general surgery and plastic surgery.

Norris first did volunteer work in Haiti in 1965 and has worked in Brazil, Honduras, the Philippines and Vietnam repairing cleft lip and palate deformities. In 1997 when he terminated his private plastic surgery practice, he founded a company - Jamtak International, Inc. The primary focus of the company has been consultative services to health care professionals.

Norris is Attending Emeritus in Plastic Surgery at the St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, a life member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a life member of the New York State Medical Society, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine and an active member of the National Medical Association.

Although Norris left his native county in 1958, he remains connected to the community. He is a member of the Calvary Baptist Church in Kilmarnock to which he donated a cemetery in memory of his parents. Also, he oversees the Morgan E. Norris Endowed Scholarship Fund at Hampton University, which awards an entering freshman from Lancaster or Northumberland County a scholarship. He is working to enlarge the fund. (In 2008 $4,500.00 was given to a student from Lancaster County and in September 2009, $4200.00 was awarded.)

Norris is married to Motoko Endo of Tokyo. They have one son, Takashi, who resides with his family in Tokyo.

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