Daddy Grace

Marcelino Manuel da Graça was born on the twenty-fifth of January 1881 on the island of Brava in the Cape Verde archipelago, then a Portuguese possession in the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa. He was the son of Manuel and Gertrude da Graça, a family of Portuguese-speaking Cape Verdean Roman Catholics. In these small volcanic islands, shaped by both African and Portuguese heritage, he passed his youth before the wider world called him across the ocean.

At the turn of the century the da Graça family joined the Cape Verdean migration to New England, arriving at New Bedford, Massachusetts. Marcelino followed as a young man, reaching America in the years around 1903 and 1904. He took odd work — as a railway cook, a cranberry picker, a dishwasher — and, anglicizing his name to Charles Manuel Grace, began to feel a call to preach far beyond such humble labor.

In 1919 he raised his first House of Prayer in a modest tent in West Wareham, Massachusetts. From that seed grew the United House of Prayer For All People, formally established in the 1920s, a predominantly African American denomination rooted in Holiness-Pentecostal faith. Known to the faithful as "Sweet Daddy" Grace, he traveled tirelessly through the segregated South, preaching to integrated congregations decades before the civil rights era and gaining renown as a healer and shepherd of souls.

By his death in Los Angeles on the twelfth of January 1960, Bishop Grace led a movement of hundreds of thousands across scores of cities. From a small island in the Atlantic he built a house of worship that endures. May his name be spoken with honor.