1870-1922
Pentecostal Preacher

Background.

William Joseph Seymour was born in Louisiana in 1870, the son of recently freed slaves Phyllis Salabarr and Simon Seymour. Few particulars are known of his early life, except that he received scant formal education and reported having had visions of God as a young man. He was associated with the Evening Light Saints, a Holiness group that believed in faith healing and total sanctification. In 1895 Seymour arrived in Indianapolis and worked as a waiter. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church there but in 1900 moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and affiliated himself with the Church of God in Anderson, Indiana, a group that had an interracial membership. After a bout with smallpox, which caused him to lose his left eye, Seymour became ordained as a Church of God minister in 1902 and began his career as an evangelist.

Preparation.

He settled in Houston, where...