Julian Denegal Steele (October 20, 1906 – January 17, 1970) was an American social worker, activist, and federal, state, and local office holder—often the first black person to hold such a post in New England.

[11][12] Students at Ward Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee, where Mary Dawes studied prior to obtaining her BA from Boston University in early childhood education,[13] hung two “Negroes” in effigy to protest the engagement.

[11] Following a discreet six-year courtship, the quiet May, 1938 wedding in New York City between a "Negro social worker" and the "daughter of an old New England family" generated nationwide press.

[9][14][15][16] In Congress, Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo commented that Mary Dawes "appears to be sustained in her mad insane determination to mingle blood impregnated with the highest genetic values of the Caucasian and the blood of an African whose racial strains have dwelt for six thousand years or more in the jungles of a continent.”[17] Notwithstanding the controversy, in 1939 Julian Steele began work heading up Boston's new Armstrong Hemenway Foundation, focusing on affordable housing.

[30] In the direct democracy of New England town meeting, the moderator serves to supervise, guide, and referee townspeople's debate leading to votes determining the course of municipal budgets and agendas for the coming year.

[31] At the time of Steele's election, local writer Margaret Coit described town meeting as West Newbury's "favorite indoor sport," where free speech was the rule and "controversy was cherished for its own sake.

The state Attorney General supported repeal,[34] those opposing capital punishment asserted that it usually reflected race or class prejudice, while the minority who favored it cited deterrence.

Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall said at the time that Steele was the first black person appointed to such a high position in that agency.

[38] When he was appointed commissioner of Massachusetts' new Department of Community Affairs in 1968, Steele became the first black person to head an agency in the state.

[43][44] A 1937 profile in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, cataloged Julian Steele's activities as a young professional ranging from organizing aid for Ethiopia to working with Boston planners on housing—all in furtherance of his "cardinal principle .

[49] In 1954 Steele was named the first black moderator (principal layman) of the Massachusetts Congregational Christian Conference,[50] a denomination descending directly from the Puritans.