press, the people of the Azusa Street Mission demonstrated that they could
cross these social lines, and bear great fruit as they did so. 1Given the egalitarian nature of early Pentecostalism and the subversive
optics of black/white equality and, especially, black leadership, race was an
ineluctable component of early Pentecostalism. Douglas Jacobsen writes:
Early pentecostal theology cannot be discussed without examining the
issue of race. Race is an essential part of the equation because, from the
very beginning, pentecostalism straddled the race line in ways that most
other American religious movements did not. Neither white folks nor
African Americans nor people from any other ethnically identifi ed group of
Christians could claim the movement as their own. It belonged to everyone.
The pentecostal Spirit convicted, transformed, and empowered individuals
regardless of their racial identity. Multiracialism was part of the fabric of the
movement, and it naturally tinctured the rhetoric of many early pentecostal
theologians. 2Despite its promising start and the creative implementations of racially
inclusive measures by some leaders, Pentecostalism as a whole would soon
mirror the larger culture in its advocacy of segregation, its discrimination
against blacks (as fellow members and as leaders), and its theological justi-
fi cation for white superiority. As just a few examples of racial division that
failed to live up to the “working model of what nonracist pentecostalism
might look like,” 3 Jacobsen cites Charles Parham’s endorsement of the Ku
Klux Klan, 4 the formation of the Assemblies of God in April of 1914 (as
a white denomination) as an act of resistance to black leadership, 5 and the
de facto segregation of the Church of God (when their attempt at de jure
segregation resulted in protest). 6
The hope for a racially inclusive trajectory was not without war-
rant. David D. Daniels, in an essay entitled “Charles Harrison Mason:
The Interracial Impulse of Early Pentecostalism,” explores the nature of
and precedent for Mason’s “experiment in interracial worship and orga-
nization” 7 and his attempt to make the “interracial vision of the Azusa
Street revival constitutive of Pentecostalism.” 8 As head of the largely-
black Church of God in Christ (COGIC) denomination, Mason made an
explicit connection between Christian theology and racial equality in the
1917 manual for the denomination. In doing so, COGIC:
230 D.T. LOYNES