Alabama A&M appears in Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) lists from in 1927 and 1948, with the incorrect colors of crimson and old gold, which suggests that the citation did not indicate an official registration of a hood lining pattern by the Bureau.

A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described the hood lining of Alabama A&M as maroon with a white chevron, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1972. That this arrangement duplicated the hood lining the Bureau had assigned to Lafayette College in 1896 was apparently of little concern to the Bureau; by this late date it rarely attempted to register unique hood lining patterns to colleges and universities that contacted it, preferring instead to use a “generic” hood lining with a single chevron.

To resolve this duplication problem, here Alabama A&M has been reassigned a hood lined maroon with a white horizontal bar (what the IBAC called a “zone”). The “zone” was a heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau was using as early as 1902 to avoid duplications of this type. The heraldic bar in the university’s hood lining echoes a similar shape in the Alabama A&M University seal.