Michael Steele
*Michael Steele was born on this date in 1958. He is a Black attorney, political commentator, teacher, and Republican Party politician.
Michael Stephen Steele was born at Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County, Maryland, and was adopted as an infant by William and Maebell Steele. His father died in 1962. Born into a sharecropping family in South Carolina, his mother worked for minimum wage as a laundress to raise her children. After Steele's father died, she ignored her friends' appeals to apply for public assistance, telling Steele, "I didn't want the government raising my children." She later married John Turner, a truck driver. Michael and his sister, Monica Turner, were raised in the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest Washington.
Steele attended Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, D.C., participating in the glee club, the National Honor Society, and many drama productions. During his senior year, he was elected student council president. 1981 Steele received a B.A. in international studies from Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, Steele taught world history and economics at Malvern Preparatory School in Pennsylvania. He spent three years preparing for the Catholic priesthood at the Augustinian Friars Seminary at Villanova University, which he left to enter civil service. Steele graduated with a J.D. degree from Georgetown Law School in 1991. He failed the Maryland bar exam but passed the Pennsylvania exam.
From 1991 to 1997, Steele worked in Washington, D.C., as a corporate securities associate for the Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton international law firm, where Steele specialized in financial investments for Wall Street underwriters. He left the firm to create the Steele Group, a business and legal consulting firm. Steele worked as a partner at an international law firm, co-founded the Republican Leadership Council, and made numerous appearances as a political pundit on Fox News and other media. He made an unsuccessful run in the 2006 U.S. Senate election in Maryland.
From 2007 to 2009, Steele was chairman of GOPAC, an organization that trains and supports Republican candidates in state and local elections. After serving one term as RNC Chairperson from 2009 to 2011, he lost his bid for a second term. Since 2011, Steele has been a regular columnist for the online magazine The Root and as a political analyst for MSNBC. In 2018, he became a Senior Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. In 2020, he formally endorsed Joe Biden for the presidency after previously starring in an advertisement aired by The Lincoln Project.
