Alma White tried to rescue movement for whites with the term "holy dancing." In 1912 she wrote:
"The holy dance formerly belonged to the Church, but Satan captured it, and has used it for centuries as one of most powerful agencies to destroy souls.
"When this truth flashed upon me, I determined that it should again have a place in the Church and be used to the glory of God." [1]
She was an unlikely proponent of rhythmic movement: she had been raised in a Holiness environment in rural Kentucky where she believed her family were outsiders. Even though their antecedents came from Virginia and migrated to Lewis County in the 1840s, she wrote:
"Adversity had helped to keep the family united, but there was a growing restlessness among the older children, owing to a lack of the right kind of society around us. The people of the community and country were not of our class, and they knew it as well as we did. My parents had moved to this mountainous region on account of the tannery and the timber, when the family was small, but now that some of the children had grown up." [2]
Mollie Alma Bridwell was thirteen when she first saw people dancing at a Fourth of July celebration. She was visiting her grandparents at the time. [3] The only social events she attended as a teen had "so-called innocent amusements, but no card playing or dancing." [4]
An aunt invited her to stay in Montana in 1881 where northerners and southerners mixed. When the eighteen-year-old rejected their invitations to socialize
"They admitted that it was more difficult for a Kentuckian to break caste than some others, but said that I would soon play a game of cards with them and dance if the opportunity was afforded.
"From that moment, I was determined to show them that they could not mold me according to their prediction, that I was different and would remain different from all other persons they had seen or known. [5]
She married Kent White, a Methodist seminarian, and became a Holiness evangelist in Colorado. It was the 1890s, and Holiness crusades were sweeping through areas affected by the Panic of 1893. The Southern Methodist Church had closed its doors to evangelists in 1894. [6] Local Holiness associations had divided loyalties, as did her husband.
In 1901 she attended the International Holiness Assembly in Chicago. White recalled, it was held in a Methodist church building, and "was spiritually dead and was of very little interest to me." [7] The Metropolitan Church Association (MCA) was holding a rival meeting that featured Seth C. Rees and M. W. Knapp. Both were advocating leaving established denominations and forming new ones. [8]
It was in this congenial atmosphere that she saw "eight or ten persons on the platform, leaping, jumping, dancing and clapping their hands and presenting a scene that was indescribable." [9] She accompanied her description with the reproduced drawing. [10]
She and her husband organized their own Pentecostal Union in December 1901, [12] and affiliated with the MCA. It’s organizers, Edwin Harvey and Duke Farson, had come together in the 1880s to evangelize German and Scandinavian immigrants in Chicago. [13] By the time White saw them, they had organized the Society of the Burning Bush to establish premillennial colonies for the saved. [14]
Susie Stanley said: "It is impossible to determine how many revivals Alma conducted independently and how many were held in cooperation with the Burning Bush between 1902 and 1905." [15] They were in London together in 1904 where
"The revivalists did the two-step, the cakewalk, the waltz, and twirled like dervishes. Harry and Kent ‘executed an impromptu pas de deux.’ Alone, Harvey performed ‘whirling jig figures.’ The young women, dressed in blue dresses and blue bonnets with white ribbons, danced in pairs or alone, executing perpendicular jumps." [16]
After a later performance, one journalist observed
"Once in an ecstasy of intense excitement Mrs. Kent White rose from the pianoforte, rushed to the further end of the platform, uttering a piercing cry like an Indian war-whoop, and returned to her seat in a series of pirouetting movements of surprising rapidity." [17]
End Notes
1. Alma White. The New Testament Church. Bound Brook, New Jersey: Pentecostal Union, 1912. 1:232-233.
2. Alma White. The Story of My Life. Zarephath, New Jersey: Pillar of Fire, 1919. 107. Her father ran a tannery next to the house.
3. White, 1919. 153.
4. White, 1919. 164.
5. Alma White. The Story of My Life. Zarephath, New Jersey: Pillar of Fire, volume 2, 1921. 33. She wrote a multi-volume autobiography that treated her 1919 memoir as its first volume.
6. For more on the roots of the Holiness Movement and its growth in the 1890s, see the entry on William Seymour posted on 7 December 2017.
7. Alma White. The Story of My Life. Zarephath, New Jersey: Pillar of Fire, volume 3, 1924. 279.
8. White, 1924. 279-280.
9. Mollie Alma White. Looking back from Beulah. Denver: The Pentecostal Union, 1902. 254.
10. White, 1924. 285. No credits were given for the art work.
11. White, 1924. 285-286.
12. White, 1924. 302.
13. William Kostlevy. Holy Jumpers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. No page numbers in on-line edition. Edwin L. Harvey and Marmaduke Mendenhall Farson.
14. Christopher Long. "Burning Bush Colony." Handbook of Texas Online. 12 June 2010. Last updated 5 November 2012.
15. Susie C. Stanley. Feminist Pillar of Fire: The Life of Alma White. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1993. 56.
16. Stanley. 56. Harry Harvey was the brother of the founder of Burning Bush. Perpendicular jumps differed from ballet leaps like jetés that moved horizontally. She was quoting "Pentecostal Dancers." [London] Daily Mail 2 December 1904 and an undated article in the Daily Mail.
17. "‘Red Hot’ Revival Services." South London Observor and Camberwall and Peckham Times 10 December 1904. Quoted by Stanley. 57.
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