William Joseph Seymour

William Joseph Seymour was born on the second of May 1870 at Centerville, Louisiana, the son of Simon Seymour — a freedman and Union Army veteran — and Phyllis Salabarr, of Louisiana Creole African descent. He was raised in the Bayou Teche country of southern Louisiana on a smallholding and educated only at the village Baptist chapel. He left Louisiana around 1895 as part of the great post-Reconstruction migration of southern Black workers and worked across the following decade in Memphis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Houston in waiterships and railway portering.

He contracted smallpox in 1903 and lost the sight of his left eye. He came under the teaching of the holiness preacher Lucy Farrow in Houston in 1905 and, through her introduction, to the Bible Institute of the white pastor Charles Fox Parham — who at the same Institute had two years before formulated the Pentecostal doctrine that speaking in tongues was the necessary biblical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Parham — under Texas segregation law — did not admit Seymour to the classroom; Seymour received the lectures from the corridor outside the door.

He accepted in February 1906 an invitation to pastor a small holiness mission at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles. The congregation rejected his teaching in March; he and a few followers continued to hold prayer meetings at a private home on Bonnie Brae Street. On the ninth of April 1906 — at the third meeting — a member of the congregation began to speak in tongues. Within a week the prayer meeting had moved back to Azusa Street, which became the centre of a revival that across the following three years drew sustained attendance of an estimated thirteen hundred persons from the Pacific Coast and the Midwest. The meetings — interracial, intercultural, led by a one-eyed Black pastor — produced the founding generation of every major Pentecostal denomination subsequently established in the world. The movement that emerged from the Azusa Street Revival is now the second-largest body of Christian believers worldwide.

He died of a heart attack at Los Angeles on the twenty-eighth of September 1922, at fifty-two.

He is honored here as the pastor of the Azusa Street Revival.