William Seymour

William Joseph Seymour (May 2, 1870 – September 28, 1922) was an African-American holiness preacher who initiated the Azusa Street Revival, an influential event in the rise of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.

He was the second of eight children born to emancipated slaves and raised Catholic in extreme poverty in Louisiana.

Seymour was a student of the early Pentecostal minister Charles Parham, and he adopted Parham's belief that speaking in tongues was the sign of receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

In 1884, when Seymour was fourteen years old, his parents built a house about a mile and a half from his birthplace adjacent to the New Providence Baptist Church in Centerville that the family likely attended while remaining Catholics.

While serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Seymour's father contracted an illness from which he finally died in November 1891.

The twenty-one-year-old William then became the primary provider for his family, growing subsistence crops with very limited income from other sources.

The family was able to keep their property but lived at the poverty level.

Seymour grew up during a period of heightened racism that likely led to his decision to move north, away from the persecution endured by southern blacks around the turn of the century.

In 1895, Seymour moved to Indianapolis, where he attended the Simpson Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church (and possibly other African American churches) and became a born-again Christian.

In Indianapolis, Seymour was introduced to the Holiness movement through Daniel S. Warner's "Evening Light Saints", a group whose distinctive beliefs included non-sectarianism, faith healing, foot washing, the imminent Second Coming of Christ, and separation from "the world" in actions, beliefs, and lifestyle, including not wearing jewelry or neckties.

Between 1895 and 1905, Seymour also met other holiness leaders, including John Graham Lake and Charles Parham, who was leading a growing movement in the Midwest.

Parham's Apostolic Faith Movement emphasized speaking in tongues.

Although speaking in tongues had occurred in some isolated religious circles as early as 1897, Parham began to practice it in 1900 and made the doctrine central to his theological system, believing it to be a sign that a Christian had received the baptism with the Holy Spirit.

In the summer of 1900, Seymour returned to Louisiana and worked briefly as a farm hand.

In 1901, Seymour moved to Cincinnati, where he worked as a waiter and probably attended God's Bible School and Training Home, a school founded by holiness preacher Martin Wells Knapp.

At Knapp's school, blacks and whites studied side by side.

Knapp taught Premillennialism—that Jesus would return prior to a literal millennium—and also took seriously "special revelation" such as dreams and visions.

While in Cincinnati, Seymour contracted smallpox and was blinded in his left eye.

Seymour blamed his disability on his reluctance to answer God's call to the ministry.

On January 1, 1901, Parham and some of his students were praying over Agnes Ozman when she began to speak in what was interpreted to be Chinese, a language Ozman never learned.

Pentecostals identify Ozman as the first person in modern times to receive the gift of speaking in tongues as an answer to prayer for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Seymour moved to Houston in 1903.

During the winter of 1904–1905, he was directed by a "special revelation to Jackson, Mississippi, to receive spiritual advice from a well-known colored clergyman".

He probably met Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, founders of what would become the Church of God in Christ.

Parham also spoke in tongues and went on to open a Bible school in Houston as his base of operations in 1905.

When Houston African American holiness leader Lucy F. Farrow took a position with Charles Parham's evangelistic team as his children's nanny, Farrow asked Seymour to pastor her church.

In 1906, Seymour moved to Los Angeles, California, where he preached the Pentecostal message and sparked the Azusa Street Revival.

The revival drew large crowds of believers as well as media coverage that focused on the controversial religious practices as well as the racially integrated worship services, which violated the racial norms of the time.

Seymour's leadership of the revival and publication of The Apostolic Faith newspaper launched him into prominence within the young Pentecostal movement.

Seymour broke with Parham in 1906 over theological differences as well as Parham's unhappiness with interracial revival meetings.

As the revival's influence extended beyond Los Angeles through evangelism and missionary work, Seymour was in the process of developing the revival into a larger organization called the Apostolic Faith Movement.

This process was ultimately defeated by power struggles with other ministers, such as Florence Crawford and William Howard Durham, which ultimately damaged the unity of the early Pentecostal movement and led to a decrease in Seymour's influence.

In 1906, with Farrow's encouragement, Seymour joined Parham's newly founded Bible school.

Though Seymour's attendance at Parham's school violated Texas Jim Crow laws, with Parham's permission, Seymour simply took a seat just outside the classroom door.

Parham and Seymour shared pulpits and street corners on several occasions during the early weeks of 1906, with Parham only permitting Seymour to preach to blacks.

By 1914, the revival was past its peak, but Seymour continued to pastor the Apostolic Faith Mission he founded until his death.

The revival acted as a catalyst for the spread of Pentecostal practices, such as speaking in tongues and integrated worship, throughout the world.

It also played an important role in the history of most major Pentecostal denominations.

William Joseph Seymour was the second of eight children born to emancipated slaves Simon and Phyllis Salabar Seymour in Centerville, Louisiana.

He was baptized as a child at the Church of the Assumption in Franklin, a Catholic parish.