Steele was the son of a coal miner, an only child. At a young age, he knew that he wanted to be a preacher, and he started preaching when he was 15 years old. Steele graduated from Morehouse College in 1938. He then began preaching in Toccoa and Augusta, Georgia, then in Montgomery, Alabama, at the Hall Street Baptist Church (1938–1952).[1]:35 In 1952 Steele moved to Tallahassee, where he started preaching at the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. Steele met Martin Luther King Jr. when he[who?] was on his way to Tallahassee.
Steele at the Capitol for silent vigil supporting government aid to the poor in 1968.
The Tallahassee bus boycott began in May, 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. Like other bus boycotts during the Civil Rights Movement in America, it started because black people were forced to ride in the back of the bus, and when two students refused to give up their seat to a white woman, they were arrested. An organization was formed to protest and boycott against the city bus system. The organization was called Inter-civic Council and Steele was elected president. Steele and other protesters boycotted the system by starting car pools and the bus system had stopped for the first time in 17 years on July 1. Steele was arrested many times during this period.
The people in Tallahassee thought that the protesters' demands were outrageous. Steele and the other protesters met a lot of rich and influential opposition. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of Steele's church, marched in front of his house, and threw bottles through his windows.[2]:184 The city commissioners were firmly opposed to integration of the buses. The bus system was integrated two years later.
He was also the lead plaintiff in the school desegregation suit, which led to the desegregation of public schools in Leon County.
Steele was also a part of many other protests, marches, and boycotts, where he helped to accomplish integration in many public places. Steele helped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. He was made the First Vice President under Dr. King at the time of the formation of SCLC.
Steele died from bone marrow cancer in 1980 at the age of 66 in Tallahassee.
Legacy
When the city created a new bus terminal in 1983, it was named after Steele and a statue of him (by sculptor David Lowe) was placed on the NE corner of the terminal.
Florida State University conferred on Steele the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 1980—the first to an African American, and the first to be bestowed in fifty-six years from that school.
The Bethel Baptist Church in Tallahassee, where Steele was a pastor for twenty-eight years, has established a charter school which is named in his and former Governor Leroy Collins' honor: the Steele-Collins Charter School.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Ralph David Abernathy Sr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. He collaborated with King and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to the Montgomery bus boycott, and co-created and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968; he led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., as well as other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans. He also served as an advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
Edgar Daniel Nixon, known as E. D. Nixon, was an American civil rights leader and union organizer in Alabama who played a crucial role in organizing the landmark Montgomery bus boycott there in 1955. The boycott highlighted the issues of segregation in the South, was upheld for more than a year by black residents, and nearly brought the city-owned bus system to bankruptcy. It ended in December 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled in the related case, Browder v. Gayle (1956), that the local and state laws were unconstitutional, and ordered the state to end bus segregation.
Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth was an American civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, initiated and was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. He worked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, though the two men often disagreed on tactics and approaches.
Wyatt Tee Walker was an African-American pastor, national civil rights leader, theologian, and cultural historian. He was a chief of staff for Martin Luther King Jr., and in 1958 became an early board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He helped found a Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in 1958. As executive director of the SCLC from 1960 to 1964, Walker helped to bring the group to national prominence. Walker sat at the feet of his mentor, BG Crawley, who was a Baptist Minister in Brooklyn, NY and New York State Judge.
The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed on December 5, 1955 by black ministers and community leaders in Montgomery, Alabama. Under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Edgar Nixon, the MIA was instrumental in guiding the Montgomery bus boycott, a successful campaign that focused national attention on racial segregation in the South and catapulted King into the national spotlight.
State Road 373 (SR 373) or C.K. Steele Memorial Highway is a 1.708-mile-long (2.749 km) east–west state highway in Tallahassee, in the northern part of the U.S. state or Florida. It travels along Orange Avenue between SR 371 and SR 61. In 2018, the Florida Legislature designated the roadway as C.K. Steele Memorial Highway in honor of late civil rights leader Charles Kenzie Steele.
The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.
James Luther Bevel was an American minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and then as its Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education, Bevel initiated, strategized, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1965 Selma voting rights movement, and the 1966 Chicago open housing movement. He suggested that SCLC call for and join a March on Washington in 1963. Bevel strategized the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, which contributed to Congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The Women's Political Council (WPC), founded in Montgomery, Alabama, was an organization that formed in 1946 that was an early force active in the civil rights movement that was formed to address the racial issues in the city. Members included Mary Fair Burks, Jo Ann Robinson, Maude Ballou, Irene West, Thelma Glass, and Euretta Adair.
The history of Tallahassee, Florida, much like the history of Leon County, dates back to the settlement of the Americas. Beginning in the 16th century, the region was colonized by Europeans, becoming part of Spanish Florida. In 1819, the Adams–Onís Treaty ceded Spanish Florida, including modern-day Tallahassee, to the United States. Tallahassee became a city and the state capital of Florida in 1821; the American takeover led to the settlements' rapid expansion as growing numbers of cotton plantations began to spring up nearby, increasing Tallahassees' population significantly.
Aurelia Shines Browder Coleman was an African-American civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama. In April 1955, almost eight months before the arrest of Rosa Parks and a month after the arrest of Claudette Colvin, she was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider.
The Freedom Rides Museum is located at 210 South Court Street in Montgomery, Alabama, in the building which was until 1995 the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station. It was the site of a violent attack on participants in the 1961 Freedom Ride during the Civil Rights Movement. The May 1961 assaults, carried out by a mob of white protesters who confronted the civil rights activists, "shocked the nation and led the Kennedy Administration to side with civil rights protesters for the first time."
The First Baptist Church on North Ripley Street in Montgomery, Alabama, is a historic landmark. Founded in downtown Montgomery in 1867 as one of the first black churches in the area, it provided an alternative to the second-class treatment and discrimination African-Americans faced at the other First Baptist Church in the city.
The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was an American civil rights organization in Birmingham, Alabama, which coordinated boycotts and sponsored federal lawsuits aimed at dismantling segregation in Birmingham and Alabama during the civil rights movement. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, served as president of the group from its founding in 1956 until 1969. The ACMHR's crowning moment came during the pivotal Birmingham campaign which it coordinated along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the spring of 1963.
This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.
The Holt Street Baptist Church is a historic Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, United States.
Samuel Woodrow Williams was a Baptist minister, professor of philosophy and religion, and Civil Rights activist. Williams was born on February 12, 1912, in Sparkman then grew up in Chicot County, Arkansas. An African American, Williams attended Morehouse College where he received his bachelor's degree in philosophy and later attended Howard University earning his master's degree in divinity.
The Tallahassee bus boycott was a citywide boycott in Tallahassee, Florida, that sought to end racial segregation in the employment and seating arrangements of city buses. On May 26, 1956, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, two Florida A&M University students, were arrested by the Tallahassee Police Department for "placing themselves in a position to incite a riot". Robert Saunders, representing the NAACP, and Rev. C. K. Steele began talks with city authorities while the local African-American community started boycotting the city's buses. The Inter-Civic Council ended the boycott on December 22, 1956. On January 7, 1957, the City Commission repealed the bus-franchise segregation clause because of the United States Supreme Court ruling Browder v. Gayle (1956).
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