Grace, Charles Manuel 'Daddy' (Marcelino Manuel da Graca)
1881-1960 · Contribution: 1919-1960
Founded the United House of Prayer for All People, building it into a financially self-sustaining Black religious denomination that preached to integrated congregations across the segregated South decades before the civil rights movement
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Impact on the world
Founded the United House of Prayer for All People in 1919 with an initial investment of just $39, building it over four decades into a denomination with its own pension fund, insurance plan, and manufacturing businesses, and personally amassing a substantial real estate empire including mansions and hotels from New York to Cuba; he traveled the segregated South in the 1920s and 1930s preaching to integrated congregations years before the mainstream civil rights movement, even as critics, including rivals whose own properties he later acquired, accused him of exploiting working-class followers' devotion for personal gain.
Life & background
Born Marcelino Manuel da Graca in the Cape Verde Islands, then a Portuguese territory, Grace immigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts as part of a wave of Cape Verdean migration and, after working as a railway cook, declared himself a bishop and built his first House of Prayer in West Wareham, Massachusetts in 1919 for a reported cost of $39. He expanded the church into a national denomination, the United House of Prayer for All People, incorporated in Washington, D.C. in 1927, whose constitution explicitly welcomed all people 'irrespective of denomination or creed,' and which preached to integrated Southern congregations during the height of Jim Crow segregation. While critics and outside observers frequently questioned whether Grace's working-class followers' donations primarily served the church's stated mission or his own considerable personal enrichment, including a real estate portfolio that, in a pointed and controversial move, came to include the former Harlem headquarters of religious rival Father Divine's Peace Mission movement after Grace purchased and then evicted that organization in 1938, the church itself developed lasting institutional infrastructure under his leadership, including a pension fund and insurance plan for elderly members and ministers. He taught a doctrine of singular, divinely appointed leadership in each era, comparing his own role to that of Noah or Moses, and remained the church's central figure, making frequent public appearances even as declining health limited his direct involvement, until his death in 1960; his successors expanded the church's emphasis on affordable housing and social welfare programs, and it remains an active denomination today.
Sources
- Encyclopedia.com (Daddy Grace); Harlem World Magazine; Emory University Rose Library
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