Rev. C.K. Steele, Gov. LeRoy Collins, and the 1956 Bus Boycott

(From: Governor (1955-1961: Collins), Correspondence, 1955-1961, Series S 776)

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A native of Bluefield, West Virginia, the Reverend C.K. Steele (1914-1980) came to Tallahassee in the early 1950s to serve as pastor for the Bethel Baptist Church. Steele became the most recognizable figure in the Tallahassee civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. After the success of the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, African American leaders moved to integrate public transportation in other southern cities, including Tallahassee. Steele led a boycott of the city-run bus system that lasted primarily from May to December of 1956, but did not officially end until May 1958. Steele and other leaders were the targets of violence from white supremacists, and Florida Governor LeRoy Collins would suspend bus operations for a time during the winter of 1957. According to Tallahassee historians Mary Louise Ellis and William Warren Rogers, "City commissioners and protesting blacks never achieved a formal settlement, but gradually the sight of blacks riding at the front of the bus became more common, and the battle moved to another front."(1) Steele, meanwhile, was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, marched with Martin Luther King, and was a progressive voice in the Tallahassee community until his death in 1980. The city's new bus terminal was named in his honor. The documents reproduced here are an exchange of telegrams between Steele and Governor Collins in the midst of the 1956 boycott.

(1) Mary Louise Ellis and William Warren Rogers, Tallahassee: Favored Land (Norfolk: The Donning Company, 1988), 173.

A text version of the Reverend C.K. Steele's telegram is included below the graphic image.

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