Introducing: Sweet Daddy Grace

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is the story of a man who's fascinated me,
haunted me, really for most of my life. His name
was Sweet Daddy Grace, and that's a name you don't forget.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Daddy Grace had seven dollars in his pocket when he.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Ends grad He was ahead of his time, a Cape
Ridian immigrant who built a fortune as a black man
during Jim Crow during the Depression. By the time he
passed in nineteen sixty, he was worth twenty five million dollars.
That's two hundred and fifty million dollars today.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
He bought huge complex in Manhattan that didn't rent the
Negro He had a coffee farm in Brazil and egg
farm in Cuba.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
His funeral procession traveled by train from California to Massachusetts.
Thousands of mourners turned out to say their final goodbye.
But today, outside of his church, not too many people
know about Bishop C. M. Grace, the man affectionately known
as Sweet Daddy Grace.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
You race sort of wiped out, and I wonder if
this was done intentionally.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
And there's one more piece of the puzzle, a big
one for me. My grandmother's a Grace, a Cape Verdie
and Grace my cousins always said that we were related
to Daddy Grace. But here's where things get murky. Every
time I asked the elder members of our family, they
flatly denied it. Not everyone has fond memories of Daddy Grace.

(01:38):
My dad kind of looked at him like the devil.
And I can remember him. Daddy Grace would be on
TV and he'd say, look at that guy with that
money suit.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
My mother denied that they were related.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Nobody wanted to be because the man was out there.
He's a cult. I'm Marcy Depena. My entire life, Daddy
Grace has been there. I've always felt this strong connection
to him. When I went to visit his grave, I
literally heard him say, tell my story.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
And doing this podcast?

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Is this? Like?

Speaker 2 (02:16):
What is it that you're looking to get out of this?

Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's an extraordinary American story. I think it's a brilliant
Cape Verdian American story, an African story, and an exceptional
immigrant story of a man who let his faith lead
him all the way across the Atlantic into great success.

(02:40):
And I really do want to know are we connected
to this man or not? Is there a relation or not?
Listen to Sweet Daddy Grace starting July nineteenth, on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.