We pick up Nardie’s story as he graduates from Shawnee High School in 1970 (“which was 75% white” at the time, he said). He capitalized on a phenomenal scholarship opportunity to go to the West Kentucky Technical College in Paducah, where he lived in a dorm with around 500 other students.
Tag: Nardie
Ed “Nardie” White Shares Portland Memories
“Portland was a closed community in a big metropolitan city. When you think about Louisville, you think about it as a big metropolitan city. But Portland was a definite city that was a community of its own. You had a pocket on Short Street. You had a pocket at St. Xavier. Owen Alley up here…that was a pocket. Those were all Black families. So we lived in clusters all around Portland. We lived in this 20-block radius. I lived between 21st street to 29th Street, that was my core area where I lived, and everybody knew everybody from generations.”