Seymour arrived in Los Angeles early in 1906 to take up an invitation to preach at a small holiness mission. He preached that speaking in tongues accompanies the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the congregation's leadership disagreed, and when he returned for the evening service he found the door padlocked. He continued in a private house on Bonnie Brae Street, and in April, during a prayer meeting there, the outbreak began: tongues, prostration, singing, and crowds large enough that the porch collapsed.
They moved to a disused building at 312 Azusa Street, a former African Methodist Episcopal church that had been serving as a stable and warehouse. Meetings ran there more or less continuously for three years, three times a day, with no advertised order, no printed programme and often no announced preacher, in a bare room with plank benches and shoeboxes for a pulpit.
The Los Angeles press covered it with contempt and fixed on the same detail visitors kept remarking on: the congregation was black and white together, with Mexican and Chinese worshippers among them, in a city where that did not happen. One visiting minister wrote that the colour line had been washed away in the blood. Seymour regarded this as the point rather than a side effect, and taught that a Spirit baptism which left a man's racial contempt intact had not happened.