Edward Daryl Irons (August 29, 1923 – January 17, 2022) was an American economist who was professor and dean emeritus at Clark Atlanta University.
[2] Irons was born in Hulbert, Oklahoma on August 29, 1923, the third of four children in a partially Cherokee family.
He graduated from Wilberforce University with a BS degree in business administration around 1948, worked for a year at Tulsa's Moton Memorial Hospital, and then attended the University of Minnesota, where he graduated in 1951 with an MA degree in hospital administration, winning an award for the best management thesis in his class.
He left this position over his participation in the Tallahassee bus boycott in 1956,[3] to pursue doctoral work in finance at Harvard.
It was the first in a wave of black commercial banks being opened around the US, and Irons served as a consultant to many of these other institutions.