Excerpts from an oral hisory of

Senior Commander
Deborah Gilbreath Montgomery

Part II - The Academy

The Friday before the academy was supposed to start, one of the ten African American men decided to drop out. The only person that the mayor had control of was me, because I was already a City employee, so he calls me into his office. He was going to put me on a leave of absence, just long enough for me to go over there and sit in the academy and get it going and then I can come back to my job.

And then I get into the academy and I’m sitting there and we’re going through the demonstration school, I’m doing all of the work, and they’re doing exams and doing physical agility. In the meantime, I get called into to Chief Rowan’s office – and he says, “I just want you to know you aren’t getting any special privileges.” I said, “I hadn’t asked for any special privileges.”

I’m in the academy and we have to go to PT [physical training] at the National Guard Armory, but there wasn’t a woman’s bathroom. All they had was men’s. So I had to physically share a locker room with 21 men. They told me I had to work out with my platoon how we were going to arrange this showering after PT. We had fifteen minutes from the time PT was over to the time we had to be back in class in uniform.

My platoon decided that when PT was getting over they would start working me down towards the door and then when they dismissed us I was the first one out. I was supposed to go in, I had to turn on all the water and then hurry up and take my shower and then put on my basic clothes and then finish dressing in the classroom. The men would come in and they’d have ten minutes, but they’d have hot water. I was showering in cold water, because it took that long for the water to get hot. Some of my other Black officers they would stand at the door because, there’s always somebody that wants to check out what’s going on, so, I was taken care of by my fellow officers.

At the end of two weeks, I’m sitting there and I’m ready to come back and I get a call from the Mayor’s office. He asks me would I stay two more weeks because Miles Lord might think something’s up if I drop out after two weeks. I was in the top of my academy, I’m doing all the work, I’m doing the physical agility, I’m still the worst shot in the academy, but we’re working on it. So, anyway, I said, okay, I’ll stay two more weeks.

Now, I’m there for a month, and by the end of the month I’m doing really well academically, with the physical agility stuff, I’m doing all the things we have to do and then it dawned on me, I said, you know, I don’t want this job, but maybe there’s a woman that wants this job and if I drop out now then there won’t be a woman to get the job. So I wanted to make sure that I could finish this twenty-one week academy. I was doing extremely well on everything except shooting.

I couldn’t shoot, I mean I couldn’t hit the target. I had to get seventy-five and I couldn’t get seventy-five. This range officer, Jim Charmoli, during the last two weeks would take his lunch, and we’d go over to the range and he’d work with me, showing me how to breathe and pull the trigger and aim and not flinch. On the last day that I could qualify or get kicked out of the academy, I finally got seventy-five.

And, in the meantime you’re building that teamwork. By this time everybody wants everybody to finish. It’s not about whether you’re a woman or Black, everyone pulled together as a team and you want everybody to pass. So, Charmoli called over to tell them that I had finally hit seventy-five. When I came back from the range, all my academy class was standing up and clapping because now we were all going to get to graduate.

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