Ida B. Robinson

Ida Bell Robinson was born on the third of August 1891 at Hazelhurst, Mississippi, the daughter of Robert Bell and Annie Lee Bell, both sharecropper descendants of formerly enslaved families in Copiah County. The family migrated north in 1905 to Pensacola, Florida, where she was converted at fourteen at the Church of God of Pensacola — a Pentecostal congregation pastored by the Indian-American holiness preacher A. J. Tomlinson — and licensed to preach at seventeen. She married the elder Oliver Robinson in 1909 and the couple moved north in 1917 to Philadelphia in the first wave of the Great Migration.

She became the elder of the Mount Olive Holy Church on Lombard Street in Philadelphia in 1919, was ordained to the bishopric in 1924 by the United Holy Church of America, and in 1924 was barred by the new general convention of that denomination from further ordaining women elders. The decision — which would over the following decade close the question of women's ordination in most Black Pentecostal denominations against women — produced her decisive break.

She convened in May 1924 at the Mount Olive Holy Church the conference that founded the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America. The founding charter — drafted by Mother Robinson and ratified by the seventeen founding congregations — established the new denomination on the explicit doctrine that women had identical access with men to all offices of the ministry, including the bishopric. She was elected the first presiding bishop and continued in office until her death. The Mount Sinai Holy Church grew across her twenty-two-year tenure from the seventeen founding congregations to ninety congregations across the Atlantic seaboard and the West Indies.

She was, at the founding of Mount Sinai in 1924, the first woman senior bishop of a major Pentecostal denomination in the United States and one of the first in the history of organised Christianity. She continued to license and ordain women clergy throughout her tenure and led with her successor Bishop Elmira Jeffries the longest unbroken female episcopal succession in any American Pentecostal body.

She died at Philadelphia on the twenty-fifth of April 1946, at fifty-four.

She is honored here as the first woman senior bishop of Black Pentecostalism.