Race and the Assemblies of God Church: The Journey from Azusa St ...

From its inception, issues of race have heavily influenced Pentecostalism. For example, disagreements over the movement’s founder and the location of its birthplace are framed in a racial context. White Pentecostals usually refer to Charles Parham’s Topeka, Kansas, Bible school when discussing the location of the origin of Pentecostalism in the United States because the first widely publicized episode of tongues speech in the twentieth century occurred there around midnight on January 1, 1901. Parham, a white minister, is also credited with the formulation of the doctrine of “initial physical evidence.” It holds that speaking in other tongues is the only physical proof that a person has indeed received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. In contrast, African Americans usually consider the Azusa Street Revival, led by William Seymour, a son of slaves, as the birthplace of the movement because the Pentecostal message spread around the world as a result of the missionaries and church organizations that originated from the Azusa meetings. Whites counter that Seymour received the Pentecostal message from Parham while attending the white evangelist’s short-term Bible school in Houston, Texas, early in 1906.²⁰ The men should be credited as joint founders of the Pentecostal movement because of their unique contributions. Parham’s emphasis on tongues speech gave the movement a distinctive doctrine that was globally disseminated as a result of Seymour’s Los Angeles ministry.

William Seymour’s early Pentecostal meetings were fully integrated. He began publishing The Apostolic Faith, a newspaper for the Azusa Street Revival, in September 1906. The first edition noted the cultural and ethnic diversity of the participants. It claimed the revival began “among the colored people” and eventually spread to the whites, “Ethiopians, Indians, Mexicans, and other nationalities… .”²¹