Steele was born on October 19, 1958, 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. His mother, who had been born into a sharecropping family in South Carolina, 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, later 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 North West, Washington, D.C., which Steele has described as a small, stable and racially integrated community that insulated him from some of the problems elsewhere in the city. Steele's sister later married and divorced former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson.