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“That’s Ruth,” Brown said. “She was definitely lovingly persistent. She didn’t give up and she never gave in. If she wanted it she just kept driving for it.” Another of Steele’s crowning achievements involved a one-of-a-kind statue that was previously located in Denver’s City Park. The statue depicts King with Emett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. It is believed to be the only statue of its kind. “Once she was able to get the Lincoln Home turned into a museum I think she went back to (Denver) Mayor Wellington Webb and, probably, persistently with love, hinted she would really like to have that statue,” Brown said. ....
Pueblo humanitarian Ruth Steele, who spent her entire life advocating for civil rights and the preservation of Black history, died Jan. 17 from stomach cancer at the age of 85. Steele, a founder of the Pueblo Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission, was best known for her efforts to bring the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday to Pueblo in the 1980s and her preservation of the historic Lincoln Home a former orphanage and senior home for Pueblo’s Black population that Steele later transformed into the Pueblo Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Commission and Cultural Center and Museum. Her death came one day after the holiday commission’s annual march through Pueblo to commemorate King’s life, which Steele led for more than three decades, and one day prior to the federal MLK holiday. ....