The Azusa Street Revival
From a converted livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, William J. Seymour led a multiracial revival that birthed the global Pentecostal movement.
William Joseph Seymour (1870–1922) was the son of formerly enslaved parents in Louisiana. Blind in one eye from smallpox and largely self-educated, he travelled to Houston to study under Charles Fox Parham, learning the new doctrine that speaking in tongues was the biblical evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit — though Jim Crow rules forced him to listen from outside the classroom door.
Invited to preach in Los Angeles in 1906, Seymour and his small congregation eventually moved into a former African Methodist Episcopal building at 312 Azusa Street. From April 1906 the meetings ran day and night — interracial in a deeply segregated America, with Black, White, Latino and Asian worshippers praying together. Frank Bartleman, a participant, wrote: "The color line was washed away in the blood."
Reporters and visitors carried the news worldwide. Within ten years Pentecostal denominations existed across the United States, Scandinavia, Brazil, India, China and Sub-Saharan Africa. Azusa Street is now widely recognised as the single most important point of origin for the global Pentecostal-Charismatic movement.