Reports of prominent African Americans line the hall on the second floor
of Urbana Middle School.  Among people profiled for Black History Month are
Jesse Owens, Oprah Winfrey, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Walter
Payton, Thurgood Marshall and Muhammad Ali.  Seeing the reports inspired me
to write one, too.
        William Seymour was a Pentecostal preacher at the turn of the 20th
century.  Though little recognized among the outstanding black American
religious leaders in the 20th century, Seymour was a catalyst for the
worldwide Pentecostal movement, now numbering several hundred million.
Seymour's spiritual heirs  -- Pentecostals and Charismatics -- span the
globe.  
        Born in 1870 to former slaves, William Joseph Seymour was raised as a
Baptist in Louisiana.   As a young adult, Seymour became enthralled with
radical holiness theology, which taught a post-conversion experience that
results in living completely holy, or without sin.  Seymour moved to
Houston where he joined a holiness church led by a black woman, Lucy
Farrow.  She put Seymour in touch with Charles Parham, a White preacher who
helped ignite Seymour's ministry and became Seymour's mentor.
        Parham believed that speaking in tongues (glossolalia) was evidence of the
baptism in the Holy Spirit.  Though Seymour had not experienced tongues, he
accepted Parham's premise.  With Parham's blessing, he moved to Los Angeles
in 1906 to help a woman holiness pastor.  The pastor, Julia Hutchins,
rejected Seymour's teaching about tongues and padlocked the door to him and
his message.
        But following a month of intense prayer and fasting, Seymour and several
friends spoke in tongues.  Word spread quickly about the phenomenon, and
Seymour looked for a suitable building where he could preach.  He found an
old building on Azusa Street, and what happened during the next three years
changed the course of history.
        The central attraction was speaking in tongues, with the addition of
traditional black worship styles that included shouting, trances, and
dance.  Still, Seymour stressed Christian love above else, including
speaking in tongues.  "If you get angry, or speak evil, or backbite, I care
not how many tongues you may have, you have not the baptism with the Holy
Spirit," Seymour said.
        Whole congregations, many of the White, came en masse to the Azusa Street
church, where Seymour said there were implications of speaking in tongues
for interracial reconciliation and community.  He connected the three-year
Azusa Street revival with the Pentecost outpouring found in Acts 2, where
the result of "tongues of fire" was reconciliation between nations and
races and cultures. 
        In some ways, the interracial miracle at Azusa Street was more astonishing
than the miracle of speaking in tongues.  With Blacks and Whites under his
leadership, Seymour admonished: "Don't go out of here talking about
tongues. Talk about Jesus."
        Among the Azusa pilgrims were Gaston Cashwell, who took the Pentecostal
message to the southern Holiness churches, C.H. Mason, who led the Church
of God in Christ, now the largest black Pentecostal denomination in
America, and William Durham, who helped start the Assemblies of God.
        When Charles Parham came to Los Angeles in late 1906 at Seymour's
invitation to lead area-wide revivals, Parham was shocked at what he saw.
He was aghast that black people were intermingling with Whites.  He could
not stand "white people imitating unintelligent, crude negroisms of the
Southland, and laying it on the Holy Ghost."
        Seymour was shocked but really powerless at this betrayal by the man who
had been his mentor.  Unbeknownst to Seymour, Parham viewed the Anglo-Saxon
race as the lineal descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.  Indeed,
for the rest of his life, Parham denounced the Azusa Street Meetings as
"spiritual power prostituted."  Yet thousands came.
        The White leadership under Seymour eventually sided with Parham.  They
could live with speaking in tongues but not with the revolutionary
interracial fellowship that Seymour insisted flowed from it.  They
abandoned love and reconciliation.  The movement split along racial lines.
        Seymour spent the last years of his life pastoring a small black church.
He died Sept. 28, 1922.   But for William Seymour, there was triumph amid
the betrayal.  Missionaries by the score flowed out from Azusa, spreading
the message of speaking in tongues and reconciliation worldwide.
        William Seymour called for an all-inclusive community of loving people
beyond color lines, but his mentor, Charles Parham, would not accept it.
And yet, even today Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are rapidly
multiplying in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and China.  That global
upsurge can trace its roots directly or indirectly to the humble mission on
Azusa Street and its unsung pastor.
  

Don Follis is a University of Illinois campus minister.  His column appears
on Fridays.  Reprinted with permission from the Champaign-Urbana
News-Gazette, copyright 2000.