Race and Ethnicity: White - Starting with I

Georg Iggers was a historian and social activist whose long career included teaching at Philander Smith College in the 1950s. Iggers, a German native, left Philander Smith in 1957 and eventually settled at the University of Buffalo, where he spent his subsequent four-decade career. Georg Iggers was born in Hamburg, Germany, on December 7, 1926. He and his Jewish family fled Germany and the Nazis in the fall of 1938. They originally landed in New York City and relocated to Richmond, Virginia, in early 1939. Iggers earned a bachelor’s degree in romance languages from the University of Richmond at the age of seventeen, before going on to earn both a master’s in Germanics and a PhD in history from the …

Wilma Iggers was a longtime and well-respected scholar specializing in German literature. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, she and her husband, Georg Iggers, a scholar of European intellectual history, were active in the American civil rights movement through their work at a number of historically black colleges in the South, including Philander Smith College in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Wilma Abeles was born on March 23, 1921, in the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. A Jew, she and her family moved to Canada in 1938 to escape the Nazis, who had recently begun their occupation of Czechoslovakia. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from McMaster University in Canada and, in 1952, a PhD in Germanics from the University of Chicago. …

James M. Ingram was a Confederate guerrilla chieftain during the Civil War who, like William “Buck” Brown, operated in northwestern Arkansas. Ingram survived the war only to be assassinated five years after its end by the son of a man he killed. James Ingram was born in Illinois in 1826 to Pleasant and Belinda Ingram. By 1848, he was living in Benton County, Arkansas, where he married Amanda Graham; they had four children. After she died around 1855, he married Sara Elizabeth Easley, with whom he would have five children. Ingram was farming in Benton County when the Civil War began, and he formed a home guard company at some point before the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862. …

Irish migration to Arkansas took place throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in three distinct settlements. Over the years, Irish residents of Arkansas have made their mark on the state, exemplified in organizations such as the Irish Cultural Society of Arkansas. About fifteen percent of Arkansans claim Irish or Scotch-Irish ancestry. The first wave of Irish immigration concerned the Scotch-Irish (sometimes called Scots-Irish), who were descendants of eighteenth-century Ulster Protestant immigrants. The term Scotch-Irish acknowledges the seventeenth-century mass Scottish migration to Ireland’s northernmost province, Ulster—a migration that left indelible marks on the culture, including stark differences in religion and nationalistic attitudes that distinguished the Protestant, pro-British “Scotch-Irish” from their Catholic, Gaelic, and generally anti-British neighbors. Scotch-Irish immigrants to the United …

The Irish Cultural Society of Arkansas (ICSA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, public-service organization based in Little Rock (Pulaski County). It was founded in 1996 to develop and enhance local interest in the culture of Ireland and its people, familiarize the general public with the culture of the Irish people and the richness of their contribution to America, reacquaint Arkansans of Irish descent with their culture and ethnic history, and publicize the presence of an active Irish community in the Little Rock area. During the 1980s, as the result of a surplus of women in the nursing profession in Ireland, many Irish women immigrated to the United States and settled in Arkansas, which faced a shortage of qualified nurses at the …

Margaux Isaksen was a world-class competitor in the modern pentathlon, an Olympic sport in which athletes compete in fencing (one-touch épée), freestyle swimming, equestrian show jumping, pistol shooting, and cross-country running. A three-time Olympian, Isaksen first started competing at the international level when she was fifteen. Margaux Isaksen was born on October 7, 1991, in Fayetteville (Washington County) to Tommy Isaksen and Kathleen West. She has a younger sister, Isabella. Isaksen’s father died of colon cancer when she was two years old. Isaksen and her sister were raised by their mother, who later married Steve Ferguson. Growing up on a farm in Fayetteville, Isaksen had ready access to horses and the opportunity to ride. In addition, she ran cross country, …

The apparent murder in Saline County in 1987 of seventeen-year-old Kevin Ives and sixteen-year-old Don Henry has spurred ongoing controversy, including conspiracy theories tying their deaths to a drug-smuggling scandal. The case was the subject of journalist Mara Leveritt’s award-winning book The Boys on the Tracks. On Sunday, August 23, 1987, at around 4:00 a.m., the bodies of the two boys were spotted by the crew of a Union Pacific locomotive near Crooked Creek trestle in Alexander (Pulaski and Saline counties). The bodies were lying between the tracks, wrapped in a pale green tarp; there was a gun nearby. The train was unable to avoid running over the bodies. The train’s crew immediately reported the incident to railroad officials and …

Dan Ivy was a high-profile attorney and political gadfly in Arkansas in the latter part of the twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first century known for his creative print and television advertisements for his law practice. In his all-black outfit—black shirt, black pants, and signature misshapen black felt cowboy hat—Ivy was a larger-than-life personality, skilled at self-promotion. Danny Chris Ivy was born on November 15, 1952, in Newport (Jackson County) to Daniel Ivy and Minnie Bell Hickman Ivy, who were devout members of the Assembly of God. He had to end his formal education while still in elementary school in order to help feed his family. When he was a child, he had a speech impediment that he …

George Izard, scholar, soldier, and army major general, served as Arkansas’s second territorial governor from March 4, 1825, until his death on November 22, 1828. Finding government in Arkansas disorganized and ineffective, Izard began the task of organizing territorial government into a more effective and efficient institution. Izard County is named for him. George Izard was born on October 21, 1776, to Ralph Izard and Alice DeLancey Izard near London, England. His father, a native of South Carolina, transacted personal and diplomatic business in Europe and later served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and as U.S. senator from South Carolina. Izard’s mother was of a prominent colonial New York family. Izard had eight sisters and four brothers. Because …