The Azusa Street Revival

Los Angeles in 1906 was full of people asking God for something. Holiness churches were praying, small groups met in houses, and copies of the reports out of the Welsh revival were passing hand to hand. Frank Bartleman, a restless journalist and street preacher, wrote letters to Evan Roberts in Wales and read the replies aloud in the meetings. Nobody in the city was expecting what came, but a good many people had been asking for it.

The man God used had been kept out of the room where the teaching happened. William J. Seymour was born in Louisiana in 1870 to parents who had been slaves, and smallpox had taken the sight of one eye. In Houston he asked to study under Charles Parham, who taught that speaking in tongues was the sign of the Spirit's filling. Under Jim Crow, Parham would not seat a black man with his white students, so Seymour took the lessons from the hallway, through a door left open a crack.

An invitation brought him to Los Angeles early in 1906 to preach at a small holiness mission on Santa Fe Avenue. He preached Acts 2:4, that there was a filling of the Spirit the congregation had not yet received, and when he came back for the next service he found a padlock on the door. He did not leave town. He moved in with the Asberry family at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street and kept praying with whoever would pray with him.

On April 9, 1906, it broke. A man named Edward Lee began to speak in a language he had not learned; that evening Jennie Evans Moore and others did the same, and Seymour himself a few days later. Word ran through the neighborhood, the house filled, the yard filled, the street filled, and the front porch gave way under the weight of the crowd. They needed a bigger building and had almost no money to find one.

What they found was a wreck at 312 Azusa Street, a former African Methodist Episcopal church that had been serving as a stable and warehouse, roughly forty feet by sixty. They put sawdust on the floor, laid planks across nail kegs for benches, and stacked two wooden shoe crates for a pulpit. Seymour often preached with his head bowed inside the crates, praying while others spoke. From about mid-April 1906 the meetings ran three times a day and effectively never stopped for three years.

The city noticed fast. On April 18, 1906, the same morning San Francisco was shaking apart in the earthquake, the Los Angeles Daily Times ran the story under the headline "Weird Babel of Tongues" and opened it: "Breathing strange utterances and mouthing a creed which it would seem no sane mortal could understand, the newest religious sect has started in Los Angeles." That September a Los Angeles paper went after the room itself, sneering at the mission's "disgraceful intermingling of the races." The reporters meant that one as an insult. It was, in fact, the most remarkable thing about the place.

There was no printed order of service, no choir, no name on the door, and no offering forced on anyone; a box on the wall took what people chose to give. Black, white, Mexican, and Chinese believers sat on the same planks, and a black man led. In 1906. Bartleman, who was there, wrote the sentence the movement has never stopped quoting: "The 'color line' was washed away in the blood." Parham himself came in the autumn of 1906, denounced what he saw in racial terms, and was shown the door.

In September 1906 the mission began printing its own paper, The Apostolic Faith, and mailed it free to anyone who asked. It carried testimonies of healings, conversions, and tongues, and by 1908 it claimed a mailing list of about fifty thousand, the mission's own count of itself, and best read that way. People came to Azusa, received, and went home. Within roughly two years workers had gone out to more than twenty-five nations, again by the mission's own reckoning.

The unraveling was ordinary and sad. In 1908 the paper's mailing list was taken to Portland, Oregon without Seymour's consent, and the mission's voice went with it. Crowds thinned, leaders quarreled, and Azusa shrank back into a small black congregation. Seymour pastored it until he died of a heart attack in 1922; his wife, Jennie Moore Seymour, kept it going until her death, and the building was torn down in 1931. Nothing on that block marks it now but a plaque.

The hardest honesty comes last. The new Pentecostal bodies that grew out of Azusa organized themselves back along the color line it had crossed, the Assemblies of God formed in 1914 as a largely white fellowship, and the Church of God in Christ, whose founder Charles Harrison Mason had received at Azusa in 1907, remained a largely black one. American Pentecostalism stayed divided for most of a century, until white and black leaders met in Memphis in 1994 to repent of it publicly. God gave that church a picture of Revelation 7:9 and the church put it down. The picture was still real.