Lucy Stone
*The birth of Lucy Farrow is celebrated on this date in 1851. She was a Black Holiness pastor who was instrumental in the early foundations of Pentecostalism.
Lucy F. Farrow was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia. She was the niece of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In 1905, she worked for Charles Fox Parham during his Houston, TX, crusade as a cook during that summer while she was pastoring a small Holiness church in Texas. When Parham's Houston meeting closed, he invited Farrow to accompany them to Kansas as a governess for his children.
During this time, she asked her friend William J. Seymour to care for her church in her absence. Through her interactions with Parham, Farrow experienced glossolalia. On her return, she encouraged Seymour to enroll in the Bible College Parham started in January of 1906, where he would eventually be convinced of many of Parham's teachings. Later, in 1906, when William Seymour became the pastor of a Holiness church in Los Angeles, he sent for Farrow to join him in what would become known as the Azusa Street Revival.
She would be known as the "anointed handmaiden" who laid her hands on many who received the Holy Spirit and the gift of glossolalia. Later, in 1906, she traveled to Johnsonville, Liberia, and reportedly experienced the gift of xenolalia. She spoke the Kru language, preaching to the Kru people and spreading the Pentecostal message in Africa. She was the first Black person to be recorded as having spoken in tongues. After eventually returning to Los Angeles, then later to Houston, Farrow contracted tuberculosis and died in 1911.
