AZUSA STREET

Azusa Street

Abstract

In the spring of 1906, a religious awakening, known as the “Azusa Street Revival”, began at a small prayer meeting in Los Angeles. With its emphasis on an experiential “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and the accompanying phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” Besides the emphasis on spirit-inspired utterances, the early stage of this revival was marked by a sense of interracial unity, unprecedented within American Christianity and unique for its time. This rhetorical history documents how this countercultural racial integration was nurtured rhetorically in the early revival and how the message of interracial unity was soon eclipsed by other ...