William Seymour was the son of former slaves, blind in one eye, and had learned the doctrine that speaking in tongues accompanies baptism in the Holy Spirit from a teacher in Texas whose segregated classroom obliged him to listen from the corridor. He came to Los Angeles in 1906 to preach at a small holiness mission, was locked out of it for what he taught, and continued in a house on Bonnie Brae Street. When the crowds broke the porch, the meeting moved to a disused building on Azusa Street that had been an African Methodist church and was then serving as a stable and warehouse.
Meetings ran three times a day for about three years, with no fixed order of service and no advertised preacher. What visitors reported, and what the newspapers mocked, was the noise, the tongues, the healings and above all the mixing: black, white, Latino and Asian worshippers, women preaching alongside men, at a time and in a country where that combination was close to unthinkable. One participant wrote that the colour line had been washed away in the blood.
Reports went out through a free paper the mission printed, and workers left from the meetings for Scandinavia, Africa, India and Latin America within months. Most branches of world Pentecostalism trace their descent to this address, and the movement's later separation into white and black denominations is a departure from what began here, not a continuation of it.