Historic donation leads to Choctaw-Ireland scholarship

The $170 donated by Choctaw leaders in 1847 — or “Black ’47,” as the Irish who survived the rampant starvation, disease and exposure remembered it — would today have amounted to over $5,000, historians estimate.The $170 donated by Choctaw leaders in 1847 — or “Black ’47,” as the Irish who survived the rampant starvation, disease and exposure remembered it — would today have amounted to over $5,000, historians estimate.