In Commemoration of Black History Month, Hosanna Broadcasting Network (HBN) is celebrating one of the Great Giants of the Christian faith – William J. Seymour – an African American Holiness preacher of his time. He was a devout man of God who prayed for seven hours every day yearning for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. He was the least recognized, an unsung man of God who was used by God to initiate the Azusa Street Revival that influenced the rise of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement. Against all the rejection because of his skin color, God honored William J. Seymour – a one-eyed son of a slave, by giving him his heart’s desire and poured out the Holy Spirit in a dilapidated building on Azusa Street Baptizing all in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in Tongues. God had used Seymour in the most amazing way to display His supernatural uncommon miracles. He allowed this man to be able to pray for the sick and the sick recovered. He prayed with sinners so that their hearts were turned to God. Miracles were happening on a daily basis. There were so many converts, so many healed, so many filled with the Holy Spirit. As we celebrate William Joseph Seymour, an amazing African American leader during “Black History Month,” we also celebrate our own heroes of the Christian Faith. We give honor to heroes such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B Dubois, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, and many others who have made a great impact on Black America; because of such heroes, freedom is won in our community.

William Joseph Seymour was born in Centerville, Louisiana, on May 2, 1870, to former slaves Simon and Phyllis Seymour. Raised as a Baptist, Seymour was given dreams and visions as a youth. At age 25, he moved to Indianapolis, where he worked as a railroad porter and then waited on tables in a fashionable restaurant. Around this time, he contracted smallpox and went blind in his left eye. In 1900 he relocated to Cincinnati, where he joined the “reformation” Church of God (headquartered in Anderson, Indiana), also known as “the Evening Light Saints.” Here he became steeped in radical Holiness theology, which taught second blessing entire sanctification (i.e., sanctification is a post-conversion experience that results in complete holiness), divine healing, pre-millennialism, and the promise of a worldwide Holy Spirit revival before the rapture.

Photo by: RevivalLibrary.org

In 1903 Seymour moved to Houston, Texas. There he joined a small Holiness church pastored by a black woman, Lucy Farrow, who soon put him in touch with Charles Fox Parham. Parham was a Holiness teacher under whose ministry a student had spoken in tongues (glossolalia) two years earlier; for Parham, this was the “Bible evidence” of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Parham established a Bible school to train disciples in his “Apostolic Faith” Farrow urged Seymour to attend. Since Texas law forbade blacks to sit in classrooms with whites, Parham encouraged Seymour to remain in a hallway and listen to his lectures through the doorway. Seymour was humble and desperate enough to accept Parham’s promise of a “third blessing – “the baptism in the Holy Spirit,” by speaking in tongues. Though Seymour had not yet personally experienced tongues, he sometimes preached this message with Parham in Houston churches.

In early 1906, Seymour was invited to help Julia Hutchins pastor a Holiness church in Los Angeles. With Parham’s support, Seymour journeyed to California, where he preached the new Pentecostal doctrine using Acts 2:4 as his text. Hutchins, however, rejected Seymour’s teaching on tongues and padlocked the door to him and his message. Seymour was then invited to stay in the home of Richard Asberry at 214 Bonnie Brae Street, where on April 9, after a month of intense prayer and fasting, Seymour and several others spoke in tongues. Word spread quickly about the strange events on Bonnie Brae Street and drew so much attention that Seymour was forced to preach on the front porch to crowds gathered in the street. At one point, the jostling crowd grew so large the porch floor caved in. This was the start of the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. The revival was birthed in a former African Methodist Episcopal church building located at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, California. People were witnessing amazing miracles on a daily basis. The blind received sight, the lame walked, limbs were restored, and many accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior and were filled with the Holy Spirit.

What happened at Azusa Street during the next three years was to change the course of church history. Seymour found an old abandoned African Methodist Episcopal church on Azusa Street, it measured only 40 by 60 feet. Nearly, six hundred people jammed inside while hundreds more looked in through the windows to be part of the “Apostolic Faith Mission.” The local newspaper coverage spoke cynically about the “weird babble of tongues” of “colored mammy’s,” on street corners and trolley cars, the news iintrigued the city. Whole congregations came in masse to Azusa Street and stayed while their former churches disappeared. Other Pentecostal centers soon sprang up around town. Reporting on all this was Frank Bartleman, an itinerant Holiness preacher, and rescue mission worker, who wrote to the Way of Faith in South Carolina that “Pentecost has come to Los Angeles, the American Jerusalem.” His reports, which were printed and reprinted in the Holiness press, spread a contagious fever of curiosity about the Azusa Street meetings all across the country.

Blacks and whites worked together in apparent harmony under the direction of a black pastor, a marvel in the days of Jim Crow segregation. This led Bartleman to exult, “At Azusa Street, the color line was washed away in the Blood.” Seymour dreamed that Azusa Street was creating a new kind of church, one where a common experience in the Holy Spirit tore down old walls of racial, ethnic, and denominational differences. To Seymour, tongues were not the only message of Azusa Street: “Don’t go out of here talking about tongues: talk about Jesus,” he admonished. Another message was that of racial reconciliation. By the year 2000, the spiritual heirs of Seymour, the Pentecostals, and charismatics, numbered over 500 million adherents, making it the second-largest family of Christians in the world. Today, practically all Pentecostal and charismatic movements can trace their roots directly or indirectly to the humble mission on Azusa Street and its pastor.