SWEET DADDY' WIDOW TO GET HER SAY IN COURT

This article was published more than 28 years ago SWEET DADDY' WIDOW TO GET HER SAY IN COURT By Cindy Loose April 14, 1996 at 1:00 a.m. EDT Apostle C.L. McCollough set his jaw and stood ramrod straight as the funeral director inserted a rod into the casket of his father, Bishop Walter "Sweet Daddy" McCollough, dead more than a year. The son flinched as the lock clicked. When the lid opened, he stepped forward to fulfill his elderly mother's wishes, looking inside to make sure that the new leaders of Sweet Daddy's church had obeyed a court order to take his body from a temporary crypt and return it to his family. Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. That moment, captured four years ago on a grainy black-and-white videotape, revealed the depth of the schism between the McCollough family and the new leaders of the United House of Prayer for All People Built on the Apostolic Rock -- the Washington-based church that is one of the biggest and richest black churches in the world. Beginning Monday, the family's private battle with the new bishop, S.C. Madison, will go public in D.C. Superior Court. In a civil suit, Clara B. McCollough, Sweet Daddy's 81-year-old widow, contends that Madison, his wife, Delores, and two church employees deceived her husband and took some of his most valuable possessions -- things that should have been hers after his death. The Madisons and the church employees contend in depositions that Sweet Daddy McCollough gave them some of the property in question -- jewelry, a car -- and that the rest belonged to the church. But they declined to discuss the case, which has taken three years to go to trial. 🏛️ Follow Politics Clara McCollough believes that the defendants have been "waiting for me to die." But God, she said, "has kept me alive for this." The damages she seeks are a pittance compared with the vast wealth of the church, which owns apartment buildings, businesses and undeveloped real estate in the 22 states where 105 United House of Prayer churches are located. The suit asks for a little more than $52,000 in compensatory damages and a jury decision on punitive damages. But just as important as money, Clara McCollough said, she hopes the trial will be her chance to tell her story. She wants to air her grief at being ostracized by the church where once a white carpet was rolled out for her husband when he walked down the aisle, where the faithful would thrust thousands of dollars in "love offerings" into his outstretched hands, where she was addressed as "Saint Madame" and greeted with applause. She wants to describe the shock of discovering that some parishioners' adoration was "false love." She wants to tell about the church's uniformed "Royal Guards" who she claims now surround her whenever she attends the House of Prayer's mother church on Seventh and M streets NW and about her son's being stripped of his preaching credentials. New leaders have so poisoned church members against her, she said, that she sometimes looks into the faces of people she has loved for years and sees "eyes of hatred looking back." The boxes of depositions taken over the last three years reveal a great deal not only about the legal battle but also about the last days of a man who disproved, by dying, the belief of many followers that he was immortal. During the three decades he ran the church, which was started in 1926 by Charles "Sweet Daddy" Grace, Walter McCollough raised millions, much of it a nickel and dime at a time from poor people dreaming of better lives. He invested in apartment buildings for his followers and stores in America's inner cities -- all part of his vision, he said, for black self-sufficiency. He once bought 445 acres in North Carolina intending to build a House of Prayer township, with its own police force, schools and hospital. He gave his followers a taste of that vision when he built a mini-Vatican at Seventh and M, where a gold-domed sanctuary is surrounded by church-owned apartment buildings, a cafeteria open to the public, a nursing home and stores. In the last year of his life, McCollough's family tried to hide from followers his failing health and deteriorating mental capacity. The depositions, however, reveal a man who was only occasionally lucid. His middle son, C.L., the only one of four children to follow his father's footsteps into the ministry, recalled in a deposition a Thanksgiving dinner when the bishop wandered away from the family table and began throwing things in the kitchen. "He could walk by you and not recognize you," C.L. McCollough said in the deposition. "If you would say, Come on, Daddy,' and reach out your hand, he would go, but not the way I knew my father." In an interview, he added, "I began for the first time in my life to see my father not as a child looking up would see a giant but as a man seeing a man." It was during that period that ownership of a Subaru car was transferred from Sweet Daddy McCollough to his personal maid, Jackie Wright, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. According to court documents, the transfer papers were signed by Delores Madison. That Subaru, among other things, is now at issue in the lawsuit. In her first deposition, Wright said Sweet Daddy McCollough sold her the car for $7,000. In a subsequent deposition, she said the bishop gave her the car. Asked whether she lied in the first deposition, she answered, "Whatever you want to call it." In his final days, the bishop was unable to talk. The last thing he ever said, according to C.L. McCollough, seemed so strange that his son wrote it down: "They desire to take my 31 years and throw them in the air for the birds to eat and act as if I never existed. Please don't let them." At the time, C.L. thought his father was delirious. Today, he said, he considers the words prophecy. A few days after the bishop stopped speaking, according to his family and some members of six break-away churches, a minister of the House of Prayer read a letter to church elders saying that Sweet Daddy McCollough was "transferring his spirit" to S.C. Madison, who had been pastor of the mother church in the District since the 1970s. About two months later, on March 21, 1991, the bishop died. That day, Clara and C.L. McCollough hired a locksmith to open the lock of a safe in the church office at the parsonage, a large stone house on North Portal Street NW that is famous for its thousands of Christmas lights. Inside the safe, they said, they found a single dime. A few days later, Clara McCollough went into her husband's room to collect clothes and accessories in which to bury him. When she couldn't find his jewelry, she asked Wright and Delores Madison to help her look, but they found only costume jewelry, she said. Among the missing items, she said, were a diamond ring encrusted with rubies and sapphires, gold rope bracelets, a gold tie clasp with "Rabbi" spelled out in diamonds, a large white diamond encircled by 18 smaller diamonds, a gold tie clasp with "Daddy" spelled in diamonds, a ring emblazoned with a cross made of diamonds. Wright maintained in depositions that the bishop gave her a sealed bag full of jewelry, which she hid in various places for a while. Later, she said, she turned the jewelry over to the Madisons because she "didn't trust" Clara McCollough. The Madisons said in depositions that Wright gave them two bags, one marked "church jewelry" and one marked "personal jewelry." The personal jewelry, they said, they turned over to Clara McCollough. What she got, the widow said, was only cheap costume pieces. Meanwhile, complaints began to mount against C.L. McCollough, who was then minister of a House of Prayer congregation in Marshall Heights in Northeast Washington. Church officials reprimanded him for hanging a picture of S.C. Madison, who is called "Sweet Sweet Daddy," so that it was obscured by a church chandelier. He said he also was reprimanded for allowing a woman opposed to Madison sing in his church and allowing his choir to wear black robes during a visit to the mother church. That was a sign, he said he was told, that his church was in mourning over Madison's ascendancy. In 1993, C.L. McCollough was called before Madison at a church meeting, or "convocation." The bishop heard the charges, according to McCollough, and looked heavenward as if for divine inspiration. The bishop then decreed that he would drop all charges but withdraw McCollough's authority to preach in the United House of Prayer. According to C.L. McCollough, the bishop asked whether anyone desired to become pastor of McCollough's church; he heard someone yell, "I'll take it," and turned to see one of his cousins running down the aisle. Since then, C.L. McCollough has been running a Friday night Bible club out of the basement of a District boys and girls club. He oversees work crews who fix up small houses he buys and rents to tenants. His mother lives in a modest house in Petworth, several miles from the parsonage. They have reburied Sweet Daddy McCollough's body in a mausoleum they built with family money, rejecting the $700,000 mausoleum the church built for him at Lincoln Cemetery in Suitland. People still place flowers beside the empty crypt that bears his name. 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