William J. Seymour

William Joseph Seymour was born in Louisiana to parents who had been slaves, lost the sight of one eye to smallpox, and learned Pentecostal doctrine in Houston in 1905 sitting outside the classroom door, because segregation law would not let him sit inside it. Invited to preach in Los Angeles in 1906, he was locked out of the church that had invited him after his first sermon on Acts 2:4. He kept preaching in a house on Bonnie Brae Street until the porch gave way under the crowd, then moved into a run-down building at 312 Azusa Street.

What happened there ran for three years, three services a day, with Black and white and Mexican and Chinese worshipers kneeling at the same altar in a city where that was not done. Visitors carried it home to forty-some nations within two years. Seymour spent his last years pastoring the same mission, mostly forgotten, and died of a heart attack in 1922.