William J. Seymour

Lived

1870–1922

Era

Twentieth century and after

Where

Los Angeles

Tradition

Pentecostal

The Azusa Street revival

The son of formerly enslaved parents in Louisiana, blind in one eye from smallpox, who studied under Charles Parham in Texas while segregation laws obliged him to sit in the hallway outside the classroom. Invited to Los Angeles and then locked out of the church that had invited him, he began meeting in a house and moved to a disused building on Azusa Street.

Why it matters

The revival ran there almost continuously from 1906 to 1909, and the movement that came out of it now numbers in the hundreds of millions. What visitors remarked on as much as the tongues was that the meetings were interracial, with Black and white worshippers together in 1906, and that women led. Parham came, disapproved of exactly that, and denounced it. Within a decade the American Pentecostal churches had largely re-segregated, which the movement has been reckoning with since.

In the record

1. 1906–1909 AD Revival

   The Azusa Street revival

   Led it, from a disused building on Azusa Street

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.