A.D. Porter & Sons Funeral Home

The 52-year-old had worked in banking. She’d tackled community- and economic-development projects in North Carolina that moved around hundreds of millions of dollars. She’d been for-profit, she’d been nonprofit. She’d been through leadership training at Harvard. So she got those types of emails.But this one — from a group called OneWest in Louisville — was different. It let her know that these recruiters had done their homework, that they knew what kind of work she did, that she considered it, as she says, “more than a job.” And it also tossed her life up into the North Carolina air and dropped it a state or two away in Louisville, where she’s sitting this mid-February night, listening to the mayor’s speech. At the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, a big crowd full of big names has packed in around a bartender and a spread including mashed avocado, kabobs with olives and cheese and ham, and what look like dumplings and eggrolls. A few moments ago, when the pleasant hum of conversation had plateaued and a magical number of elbows had been rubbed, Woody Porter of A.D. Porter & Sons Funeral Home, himself an institution, stood up from his wheelchair and got the speaking part of the night off to a charming start. Now Mayor Fischer stands before the clear podium in the corner, and though some of us have known him to be a bit monotonous, he’s killing with the crowd of suits, blouses, fleece vests with jeans. He’s thanking Porter and real estate developer Steve Poe for working together at a nonprofit. “Steve, thank you. You’ve been pushing, pushing,” he says. “Woody, if he’s the hammer, you’re the velvet,” and it’s like the Comedy Store in here. When Fischer talks about the injustice of redlining and “frankly, systemic, racist, institutionalized practices,” though, he gets a trio of mmhms.Smith nods along from a nearby table, where she sits beside her 15-year-old daughter, who, she’ll tell the crowd when it’s her turn to address them, she had to pull out of her first year of high school in North C... (Louisville.com )