Ira Gershwin English-language programs to primarily Hispanic and Chinese Americans. Ira and his younger brother George spent many after-school hours at the Settlement. The George and Ira Gershwin Collection is at the Library of Congress Music Division. The Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart Gershwin Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds a number of Ira's manuscripts and other material. In 2007, the United States Library of Congress named its Prize for Popular Song after him and his brother George. Recognizing the profound and positive effect of American popular music on the world's
Ira Aldridge an adaptation of Kotzebue's "" by Sheridan as "Pizarro" in 1883, "School" by Thomas William Robertson in 1885, and George Melville Baker's "Comrades" in 1889. The most prominent troupe named for him was the Ira Aldridge Troupe in Philadelphia, founded in 1863, some 35 years after Aldridge left the US for good. The Ira Aldridge Troupe was a minstrelsy group that caricatured Irish white men. The Ira Aldridge Troupe is unique in annals of minstrelsy; it was named for a Black actor who had left his homeland some 35 years before and achieved fame in Europe. Unlike most, later, Black