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, the son of Manuel da Graça and Gertrudes Lopes, both Portuguese-creole subsistence farmers of Black African and Portuguese descent. He arrived at New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1903 as one of the great Cape Verdean migrant wave to the New England whaling and cranberry economies and worked through his twenties as a railway cook on the New Bedford-to-Boston line, as a grocery clerk, and as a travelling salesman of patent medicines and religious literature across the Bristol County Cape Verdean community.

He had received the holiness ministry in his Catholic Cape Verdean youth and was converted to a sanctified Protestantism around 1916. He founded in 1919 at West Wareham, Massachusetts, his first congregation under the name United House of Prayer for All People; the founding chapel was built by his own hands of clapboard. He took the title Bishop and the affectionate name Sweet Daddy. The denomination grew from the New England congregations of the 1920s to a national body that by his death in 1960 maintained an estimated three million members across one hundred and eighty congregations in twenty-one states.

The House of Prayer combined the holiness Pentecostal worship pattern with a distinctive Afro-Caribbean musical inheritance brought through Daddy Grace from the Cape Verdean tradition. The brass-trombone choirs that the House of Prayer maintains in every major congregation — the shout bands — produced the distinctive percussive trombone music that influenced the early stylistic development of rhythm-and-blues. The denomination operated under Daddy Grace's direction substantial holdings of urban real estate that served as community-development assets across the post-war urban North.

He died at the parsonage at Los Angeles on the twelfth of January 1960, at seventy-eight. His funeral procession from Washington to New Bedford to Charlotte to Cuba was attended by an estimated one hundred fifty thousand mourners across four cities. The denomination he founded continues to the present under successive presiding bishops.

He is honored here as the founder of the United House of Prayer.