DADDY GRACE. Charles M. "Daddy" (1881–1960) Grace was the founder of the United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith. A combination of Daddy Grace's grandiosity, his followers' intense devotion, and popular confusion between Grace and the controversial Father Divine caused outsiders to be skeptical of the church for decades. After Grace's death, new leadership made superficial changes that allowed the United House of Prayer to move away from its marginal status and closer to the American religious mainstream. Early in the twenty-first century, its long-term stability invites an appreciation of the strength of the institutional foundations designed and laid by Grace.

Daddy Grace was born Marceline Manuel DaGraca on the island of Brava, Cape Verde (at that time a Portuguese territory), off the northwest coast of Africa. With his parents and four siblings, Grace immigrated to Massachusetts...