From St. Paul to Selma, Rondo neighborhood's Debbie Montgomery earned her place in history
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- From St. Paul to Selma, Alabama, Debbie Montgomery's life story reads like a Hollywood movie script. She not only watched history unfold, she is a part of history.
Her story started in the 1940s in the thriving St. Paul Rondo neighborhood.
"We had a four-bedroom house and three city lots. If you look at the city plaza, it actually shows the lots," Montgomery said.
The neighborhood was decimated as politicians built an interstate over it. Montgomery lived with her grandparents, a trained bellhop and a restroom attendant who found a way to survive.
"If it was a good tip week, we got meat. If it wasn't, we didn't. I never knew we were poor, I never felt we were poor," she said.
Resilience is in her blood, so it determination. As a teen, she was voted to represent the NAACP on a national level.
"To sit around with all these high-profile African American attorneys and be the youth member on the board, and to hear the discussions, it was just phenomenal. The insight I was getting and then bringing it back to the people here," she said. "When I tell people I was on the board with Thurgood Marshall, that was before he became the Supreme Court justice."
Then, Montgomery used her grandfather's train pass to go to Washington D.C. Yes, she attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. She headed south again three years later, a student at the University of Minnesota. They took a bus to Alabama to march from Selma to Montgomery, so African Americans could vote.
"Lyndon Johnson had the National Guard there because the KKK was there with their hoods and their guns. People always say to me, 'Weren't you afraid?' As a young person I thought I was gonna live forever. I wasn't thinking about these crazy men," she said.
She was also a standout speed skater, beating an Olympian. She still wasn't allowed to compete at the elite level. Instead, she got her master's degree and met the love of her life.
She was recruited to apply for the St. Paul Police Department. She had to take the West Point agility test, which she became the only woman to pass at the time.
"And only eight men did it faster than I did," she said.
She served on the police force for nearly 30 years. It was a career path that came under great scrutiny one city over in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a police officer.
"I just thought it was poor policing, that's all I could say. I couldn't understand how they could lose their empathy for life and for the protection of people and property," she said.
Now, she still lives in the Rondo area. They've even named a street after her.
"Each one of us has a special talent and we have to be able to identify it and we have to be able to share it," she said. "I am praying for hope in this moment, yes, I am praying for hope in this moment."
