Charles Harrison Mason

Charles Harrison Mason was born on September 8, 1864, on a farm near Bartlett in Shelby County, Tennessee, the son of Jerry and Eliza Mason, who had been converted to Christianity while enslaved. (Several scholarly references date his birth to 1866.) He came into the world in the last full year of American slavery, more than a year before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished it by ratification in December 1865. Raised amid sharecropping and hardship, and largely without formal schooling, he was shaped early by the prayer traditions of the formerly enslaved.

Converted and baptized in 1893, Mason briefly attended Arkansas Baptist College before leaving, convinced his calling lay outside formal denominational structures. With Charles Price Jones he helped form a Holiness fellowship, and the name "Church of God in Christ" came to him, he said, during a walk in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In March 1907 Mason journeyed to Los Angeles to witness the Azusa Street Revival led by William J. Seymour. There he received what he described as the baptism of the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues. That experience turned him fully to Pentecostalism; after a parting with Jones, he secured the church's charter in 1915 and led it from Memphis.

Under his stewardship the Church of God in Christ grew across every state and into many nations. By his death on November 17, 1961, it counted hundreds of thousands of members, becoming the largest Black Pentecostal body in the world. Bishop Mason is honored as a father of American Pentecostalism, whose faith carried a people from bondage into worship.