Charles Harrison Mason

Charles Harrison Mason was born on the eighth of September 1864 — eleven weeks before the proclamation of the Thirteenth Amendment — at Bartlett near Memphis, Tennessee, the youngest son of Jerry and Eliza Mason, both enslaved on the Prior plantation at Shelby County until manumission. The family migrated as freedpeople after the war to Plumerville in Conway County, Arkansas, where his father died of yellow fever during the 1879 epidemic and his mother became a sharecropper. He was baptised at the Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church in Plumerville in 1880.

He was licensed to preach by the Mount Gale Missionary Baptist Church in 1893. In 1895 he and his fellow Baptist pastor Charles Price Jones embraced the holiness teaching — the doctrine that sanctification was a second work of grace distinct from conversion — and were within two years expelled from the Arkansas Baptist Convention for it. In 1897, walking through the streets of Little Rock, Mason received what he described as the name of the new church through a verse of Thessalonians; he named the body the Church of God in Christ and called its first holiness convocation at Lexington, Mississippi, the same year.

In 1907 he and three companions travelled to the Azusa Street Revival at Los Angeles and received from William Joseph Seymour (placed in this archive) the baptism of the Holy Spirit. His subsequent embrace of the Pentecostal doctrine of speaking in tongues divided him from Charles Price Jones, who took the moderate holiness faction with him into a separate denomination. The COGIC general assembly of August 1907 at Memphis confirmed Mason as senior bishop and the church as a Pentecostal body. By his death the Church of God in Christ would have grown from the thirty founding congregations of 1907 to four thousand congregations and four hundred thousand members; it would by the late twentieth century become the largest Pentecostal denomination of any racial composition in the United States and one of the largest in the world.

He died at Detroit on the seventeenth of November 1961, at ninety-seven, and is buried at the Mason Temple in Memphis — the building from which Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon seven years later.

He is honored here as the founder of COGIC.