CDH Plans Black History Month Assembly

Aaron Benner
February 6, 2017

On February 14 CDH will host speaker Debbie Montgomery at an all-school assembly celebrating Black History Month. At the age of 19 Debbie was one of the original Freedom Riders. Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years in order to challenge the non-enforcement of the supreme court decision which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. She was the youngest person ever elected to the National Board of Directors of the NAACP.  She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington, D.C., and marched with him again from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama for the Voting Rights Act.

In 1975 she became the first female officer in the St. Paul Police Department, eventually rising to the rank of senior commander, and in 2013 won the Heritage Award from the International Association of Women Police. She served as Assistant Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety between 1991 and 1998, and elected in 2004 to the St. Paul City Council.