Georg Iggers talks to students of the Graf-Staufffenberg-Gymnasiums in Osnabrück, 2005
“I arrived in the United States in October 1938 and was sent to a boarding school, a jewish boarding school in New Jersey. And in this school, they talked to men extensively about American democracy. In January of 1939, we moved to Richmond, Virginia. Richmond was (the) former capital of the Confederate States of America. And in many ways, it was very southern in its attitude, which meant racist, among other things. … other things, centrally so. There was strict apartheid as far as blacks were concerned, and this schocked me very much. It reminded me of the ways we Jews were treated in Germany. This is how the Jews were treated before the Holocaust. I left just a few weeks before the November Pogrom. And from that time on, I felt solidarity with the black population in Arkansas, not in Arkansas, in Virginia, and when I went to the University of Richmond, I became part of a student organization which went together with students from the black Virginia Union University. One thing we worked on was trying to organize public opinion for the abolition of segregation on public areas. Then I went to Chicago. In 1948, Wilma and I married, and in September 1950, I was offered a position at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas.”