In 1952, Reverend Charles Kenzie "C.K." Steele moved with his family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Tallahassee to become senior pastor at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in historic Frenchtown. He soon became a force in the Tallahassee Bus Boycott and in organizations created to eliminate segregation in the city and nation. Bethel Missionary Baptist Church became a safe haven for planning strategies during the Civil Rights Movement as CORE, the Urban League, the SCLC, the NAACP, the Tallahassee Ministerial Alliance, and the Inter-Civic Council used the church for mass meetings, planning boycotts and sit-ins, finding safe housing for protesters, raising bail money, organizing rallies, registering voters, providing rides to the polls, and preparing meals. These nonviolent initiatives were carried out under the leadership of Reverend Steele and other civil rights activists. Steele was recognized and supported as the voice of the movement in Tallahassee by Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a fellow Morehouse College graduate, and the two became friends and colleagues in the effort to create a more just and equitable society. Both men were among the founders of the SCLC, organized on January 10, 1957, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, with King selected as president and Steele serving as the organization's first vice president. King visited Tallahassee several times, and although pro-segregationists called him an outside agitator, his speeches calmed the fearful and inspired the faithful, drawing full crowds from diverse social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 had made King an international celebrity, but Tallahassee's boycott, which began five months later with little outside help, showed that average citizens could prevail against the status quo. Tallahassee's bus boycott and later civil rights efforts were supported by King, and on May 26, 1957, the Inter-Civic Council invited him to speak at a rally marking the first anniversary of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. Among those who strengthened the movement in quieter ways were Lessie Graham Sanford, an NAACP member who canvassed Tallahassee, enrolled new voters, helped current voters with absentee ballots, and aided with rides to the polls, and Cornelia Roberts Osborne and her family, who supported movement leaders by hosting meals in their home.