First time I heard his name whispered in my family, I was around nine. When I was eleven, I first heard the shout music coming from down the block. At thirteen, I first tasted the church's legendary food. At nineteen, I first saw a photo of Daddy Grace standing in front of his packard in an elegant white suit, with attendants by his side.
It felt like I knew.
Him and that he knew me.
All preoper resim say man, Hey, man ay man, all broad children after bad Hands.
This is a story of a man who's fascinated me. I'm tempted to say haunted me for most of my life. His name was sweet Daddy Grace, and that's a name you don't forget. They say he sold plots into heaven. They say he wore suits made of one hundred dollar bills. They say he was God himself. There are a lot of legends around Daddy Grace, but let me tell you
some facts. Daddy Grace was born Marcellino Manuel de Grasa in the early eighteen eighties on the island of Bravakabuvid, West Africa, which at the time was a Portuguese colony. He arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at the turn of the twentieth century, along with the wave of Cape Verdian migrants who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on whaling ships headed for the Americas.
As the Cape Verdian immigrants were fleeing this land of hunger, they saw opportunity to make their way to maybe improve their lives. Daddy Grace had seven dollars in his pocket when he immigrated.
After he arrived, he began calling himself Charles Manuel Grace, not unusual for an immigrant in America, americanizing your name or having it americanized for you. Within a couple of decades after arriving in the United States, he was going by more names, Bishop Grace, Daddy Grace, or Sweet Daddy Grace. And that last name was given to him by his followers. Yes, followers, the man had thousands of them, some say as many
as three million. Because in nineteen nineteen, Bishop Grace founded a church, the United House of Prayer for All People. He built the first one in West Wareham, Massachusetts, for under forty dollars. From there, he took his evangelical mission on the road, venturing below the Mason Dixon line and beyond, setting up tent meetings and baptizing people in oceans and rivers,
and defiantly preaching to captivated and non segregated audiences. He was colorful, opulent, and unapologetic, and his personal style influenced black cultural and spiritual leaders, including James Brown. He was a visionary who built a fortune as a black man during Jim Crow during the Depression.
He bought huge complex in Manhattan that didn't rent the Negroes. He had a coffee farm in Brazil and egg farm and Cuba.
He was also controversial. He was often in the press for one scandal or another, illegitimate children tax fraud, and he narrowly avoided serving a year in prison for allegedly transporting a woman across state lines for quote immoral purposes. By the time he passed in nineteen sixty, his net worth was estimated to be as much as twenty five million dollars, which is two hundred and fifty million dollars today.
His body traveled by train from California to Massachusetts, and it was more like a final tour than a professional making several stops along the way, attracting thousands of mourners and gawgers. But today, outside of his church, which is still around, not very many people seem to know about him,
or at least talk about him. Why is that? Why would a man who was said to have raised his own sister from the dead, who had obituaries in Ebony and the New York Times, whose buildings house thousands of people, who started out with so little and ended with so much, why do so few people today remember that very memorable name.
He Race sort of wiped out, And I wonder if this was done intentionally. That's a way of silencing and making sure that someone's legacy is not carried on.
And there's one more piece of the puzzle, a big one for me. My grandmother is a Grace, a Cape Verdean Grace. Her family is also from the same island of Brava. I grew up overhearing my cousins say that we were related to Daddy Grace. But here's where things get murky. Every time I asked the elder members of
my family, they denied it, often vehemently. The more I learned about Bishop Grace and all of his exceptional accomplishments, the more bewildered I was that this man who I shared roots with had been completely left out of the history books that I grew up reading. There are no public plaques or monuments to him in his native Caboved nor in his home of New Bedford, Massachusetts, except for
the one that he paid for himself. How could a man who was beloved by so many, who fed people food for their souls and their bellies, also be so despised that people didn't even want to admit that they were related to him? And what about the air of mystery that Daddy Grace seemed to cultivate around himself.
Why was he hiding something?
What was behind my relative's rejection of him? This is a story about Sweet Daddy Grace, but for me it's personal. I'm Mercy Dupena and from iHeart podcasts and Force a media group. This is Sweet Daddy Grace.
To be happy.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's go back a bit. Let me take you to the Cape Verdian community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where I grew up. New Bedford is a place where Cape Verdians have made their mark, and everyone in the city is proud of that. You can eat foods like couscous, kachuopa and jag and here creoles spoken everywhere, and you have to make sure that you don't do anything regretful in public, because before you even reach home, someone are already called your mother.
Growing updating, you have to ask any potential made of all of their last names, just to make sure that they're not your cousin. And the parade that happens on Independence weekend, it's not your typical Fourth of July affair. It's actually the Cape Verdian Independence Day Parade, which is celebrated on July fifth. Throughout my upbringing, we learned about revolutionaries who called New Bedford their home, people like Frederick Douglas and Jabriel Kazan of the Greensboro four.
Bishop Grace not so much.
Good morning Marcy as well as good morning, cous This.
Is my older cousin, Jonathan. He grew up a few towns over and we spent a lot of time together as children. I lived in the heart of New Bedford's Cape Verdian community and its Black Power movement. Around the corner from my house was the NAACP and the former local headquarters of the Black Panther Party. So prayer was part of this nestled in between the two of them at the time, though I didn't know it was Daddy Grace's church.
What was your first, like really good memory of that when we first moved there, and like hearing the music all the time and being like, what is that?
Man? It was clearly church music. It was definitely gospel. It was definitely you know, lots of loud horns.
They really turned it up over there, they really did.
But my first actual like interaction with the church was going there, but my friends invited me to come and eat soul food. They had soul food there on Saturdays, fried chicken and fish and collard.
Greens and mac and cheese and corn.
I always thought of it as being an African American church because they served soul food. Everybody that I encountered when I went to the church to eat was not Cape Verdian, at least.
That I knew of.
It wasn't a until I was about thirteen when I overheard my parents and some of their friends who had attended services at the United House of Prayer going on and on about their experience. That's when I started to put it all together. Of Course, I'd eaten there a bunch of times, a lot of people did, but I had never even heard of anyone actually going to a service.
It was considered off limits, and I really didn't know why they were talking about how long the church services were and how everyone cried and shouted Sweet Daddy Grace, even though Daddy Grace had died decades ago. As I eavesdropped on their conversation, they traded wild stories that they'd heard about Bishop Grace, like how.
He healed people instantly with his hands, and that he had a style of.
A pimp, complete with a cane, long hair, flashy suits, and even a fleet of luxury vehicles. They also mentioned that he was Cape Verdian.
That was a complete shock. Daddy Grace is Kate Perdian. How did I not know this?
And then I started thinking about his name and how his last name was the same as my grandmother's, and I was like, wait a minute. We're a small community.
We have to be related.
And that's when the spirit of Sweet Daddy Grace really began to reveal himself to me. You've met my cousin Jonathan already, but let me introduce you to another important Jonathan in my life.
Jonathan Peppina, arm Marcy's dad. My parents are Jonathan Depina Senior and Lydia Grace Stepina, and both of them are in the heavens but very much with us all the time.
My grandparents belonged to the religiously conservative Evangelical Church of the Nazarene. My grandmother, I called her Nana, was born Lydia Anna Grace. She was always cooking on the phone, talking in Creole, working in the garden, and gathering items along with money to send to people back in the
old country. Both she and my papa were devout Christians, and like most Cape Verdians, they were upright folks who often spoke about the importance of reputation and honoring your family name, which meant that my father's dad, my Papa, was not a fan of a flamboyant preacher like Daddy Grace.
My dad kind of looked at him like the devil and I can't remember him. Daddy Grace would be on TV and he'd say, look at that guy with that money suit.
It wasn't just the money suits. It was his fingernails which were over three inches long. It was the loud shout music and dancing which seemed like possession, and it was the long list of products sold by the United House of Prayer that promised to heal you and also make your hair grow long and pretty, just like Daddy Grace.
You know how my thought was when he was critical of something, he let you know and he was so critical of him, but he never said anything in public about him that I know. My dad wasn't that type of person anyway to go spouting off his mouth in public. But within our family, he made it very clear that this guy was not welcome.
My dad's older sister, my aunt Judy, also remembers her father talking about Daddy Grace, especially when he would arrive in Massachusetts after his various travels on the road preaching, and when he did.
Come to New Bedford, it was a big tutu. Oh my, you know, Daddy Grace is in town. He's coming to town.
And I remember my father saying, oh yeah, they're laying out the red carpet for Daddy Grace. And they said that he had little girls dressed in white that would be fanning him where as he sat on the porch.
I can just imagine. I'm like, oh, mamma. My mother denied that they were related. Nobody wanted to be because the man was out there. He's a cult.
This is something I've heard before. I once asked my great uncle Abel if Daddy Grace was part of the family, and he said, absolutely not.
We have nothing to do with that man.
There were rumors and even some allegations that might suggest that Daddy Grace had less than pure intentions with some of his congregants, especially the young women, including my very own grandmother. I talked to my cousin Jonathan about this, Do you know anything about Daddy Grace trying to get Nana to join his congregation and any interaction with our great grandfather.
Our great grandfather was not too happy about that.
What I was told is that being met our great grandfather didn't want her to go.
That he was really stern, so to speak.
Almost to the point of being very physical about it.
Jonathan said he'd heard this story from a couple of people, including my uncle Abel, who was my Nana's youngest brother.
Uncle Abel would say, you know, I had so many different saying, I don't want to twist it, but he was like that man showed up on the farm thinking he could talk to your grandmother. My father would have no part of it, and then he would go into speaking Creole where he would say showing him the acts and saying, you know this is the axe, I'll sharpen it on your head.
The thing was, while Daddy Grace's methods for getting people to join his congregation may have been at best un orthodox, his church, the United House of Prayer, was in many ways pretty similar to other Black Pentecostal churches at the time. That meant long sermons, lots of music, and something that didn't sit particularly well with my mainly Catholic and Nazarene
relay latives, speaking in tongues. When someone speaks in tongues, it's supposed to show that they're communicating with God in God's language, which is only spoken and interpreted by those who are anointed. But a lot of Cape Verdians who were not members of Daddy Grace's church said that they did understand what he was saying.
One of the stories that I remember them talking about, they'd always be like he was up there speaking creole and they all thought he was speaking in tongues.
Yeah, I've heard that, actually more than once.
I have heard that same exact story from several people who knows right I mean, we weren't there, so I didn't.
You were never there there. And you know, a good story gets better as kids. Here's what I do know.
Bishop Grace was a contentious figure. He was called a charlatan, a race denier, and a predator. Yet he was beloved by hundreds of thousands. He built a massive flock and ensured that his legacy would live through his church, and in the nineteen fifties he was said to be the richest black preacher in America.
How did he do it?
What was his secret? I asked my dad how he thought this could have happened? What do you make of the massive amount of success and wealth that he was able to amass during his life? And you know, to be able to be a man who emigrated from a country that was so poor and you know, with very little resources for him to be able to purchase luxury apartment buildings in Manhattan and you know, eighty three room mansions and have a fleet of luxury vehicles and attendance.
What do you make of that?
Donald Trump, who wots doll trum? He has that power. Daddy Grace had that power that he could talk people into giving him all the money they had in hopes that they were going to heaven or they would be healed. He had that ability.
It's interesting what people correlate with Daddy Grace. For my great grandfather, it was his perceived dangerousness. For my dad, it was his way with words, his Trumpian charisma. For me, it was his audacity. And for doctor Marilyn Halter, who is not only my stepmother but also one of the pre eminent scholars of Cape Verdie in American history, it's how effortlessly he transformed from a poor immigrant into a powerful American.
What struck me about his life story was the extent to which he seemed to be constantly reinventing himself. When I've thought about his life history, the person who comes to mind that seems most akin to is Bob Dylan. His persona is very different than his actual history.
There's virtually nothing about him at all prior to his arrival in the United States, which makes him somewhat, you know, mysterious, right, And.
I think he cultivated that mystery. I mean, I think that is very much a part of who Daddy Grace became and continued to become, was, you know, creating mystery around himself.
I think some of this mysteriousness is inherent to be in Cape Verdian thing about us. We're like chameleons thanks to our history. We have so many elements to our culture, our language, and our worldview, and due to colonialism, blending in has been a mode of survival. Daddy Grace did more than survive, though he thrived. He built an empire at a scale no Cape Verdian had achieved before or since, and became one of the pioneers of what would become
the modern Black megachurch. That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. That's historian James Truslow Adams describing the American dream, a term he put into the national consciousness in nineteen thirty one. Marlino Manuel de Grasa aka Charles Manuel Grace aka Sweet Daddy Grace certainly saw the possibility in those words,
but I'm sure he also recognized their fallacy. He certainly experienced the struggle that people of color had in the United States that for most black people, racism could not be separated from the American dream.
The American dream is an ideal that mainly realized historically by white man who come from Anglo backgrounds. Right, So I think he's just an exception in some ways to the American dream in terms of being able to forge such a successful outcome in his life as a black immigrant or an immigrant of color.
But I think Daddy Grace is keep Verdian identity allowed him to have a different perspective. Cape Verdians were the first voluntary African immigrants to come to the US. No matter how tough it may have been in America, it was still better than being in colonial Capoved where countless people died during extreme droughts and famine. Unaided by the
Portuguese government. Immigration offered hope. Daddy Grace probably felt like America had streets paved with gold, and those were exactly the kind of streets that he wanted to live on.
In doing this podcast, is this like kind of really curious what your goal is to achieve out of all of this?
Is there like something that you're hoping to find or what is.
It that you're looking to get out of this? Well, I think the main reason why I'm doing this is because my entire life, like Daddy Grace has been there, You've always felt this strong connection to him, and then you know, found out.
That he was right across the street from my high school.
You know, went to go see the grave and I literally heard him saying, like, tell my story, and that was like a whoa, Okay, I don't know what this is about, but all right. And I know that a lot of Cape Verdians were very embarrassed by him. His appearance, his style of delivering the word, his religion, the money really made people feel very uncomfortable. I think people had a lot of questions about whether he was a legitimate
man of God or not. I really want to highlight his story because I think it's an incredible American story. I think it's an incredible Cape Verdian American story, and I really do want to know are we really connected to this man or not?
Like is there a relation or not.
In African cultures, the oral tradition is the primary way that stories get passed down, and in African spirituality, our ancestors service guide throughout our lives on Earth. I've been communicating with these guides for as long as I can remember, in the form of dreams, intuitions, and visions. Since childhood, I've worn a sabichi or conto doju, which is a cape Verdian beide that protects you from evil spirits. I've always had the understanding that music, dance, and storytelling are
ways to communicate with a higher power. It's been a long time since I encountered his photo and heard Daddy Grace say, tell my story, but he never stopped reminding me. In my twenties, there was this mansion that I drove by every single day. Recently I discovered it once belonged to Daddy Grace. Then it was a man who I was madly in love with. He had an affair while we were together with a woman who just happened to
impersonate Daddy Grace in a performance piece. It's taken years for me to find the courage to make this podcast because there are so many layers, so many unknowns, and it involves my family and my community. It's sensitive and I feel vulnerable telling my story. But I'm ready not just to tell the story of one man, but of his people, my people. I came from the land beyond the sea. Is the saying that Daddy Grace used to describe his origins and journey from Cobblevid. It's where the
boy called Marcellino was from. Where Sweet Daddy Grace is from, Where my family is from. That's next time. Sweet Daddy Grace is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Force a Media Group. This show is hosted by Me Marcy de Pina. It's written and produced by Marissa Brown and Me. Our story editors are Darryl Stewart, Duncan Riedel, and Zarren Burnett. Editing, sound design and theme music by Jonathan Washington. Original music by Enrique Silva of Acasia Mayor. Show cover art by
Viviana Salgado of Studio Creative Group. Fact checking by Austin Thompson. Our executive producers are Marcy Depina and Jason English. Special thanks to Will Pearson, Nikki Ettore, Ali Perry, Tamika Campbell, and Lulu Phillip of iHeartMedia and all of my family members who talked to me for this show, my ancestors, the United House of Prayer for All People, and the countless number of people who shared their memories of Sweet Daddy Grace with me. Thanks also to doctor Marie Dollam.
And doctor Danielle brun Sigler, whose academic work on Sweet Daddy Grace has been incredibly helpful. And finally, I want to thank Bishop Grace himself for choosing me to tell his story. For more information on Bishop Charles M. Grace, check out the website Sweet Daddy Grace and follow me at Marcy Dpina on all social platforms