Hampton University
Virginia
1868
Formerly “Hampton Institute”
The original colors of Hampton Institute were pink and light blue, but how and when they were selected is currently unknown. Since pink and light blue are not particularly intimidating colors to use for athletic competitions, and because athletic uniforms in these colors are difficult to keep clean, around 1895 the students at Hampton voted to change the colors to blue and white. The colors were probably derived from the winter and summer uniforms worn by the institute’s male students after the War Between the States, which were blue (winter) and white (summer). Today Hampton University defines its blue as “reflex blue”, which is a vivid medium blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): pink/light blue (1895); blue/white (1896-1908); navy blue/white (1913-1935)
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but Bureau president Gardner Cotrell Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors. Possibly by 1918 (and certainly by 1927) one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC occasionally used was the “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of between three and four inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.
Hampton Institute did not appear in early IBAC lists from 1927 or 1948, so the IBAC might not have assigned the college a hood lining until the late 1940s or 1950s. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Hampton’s hood lining as royal blue with a white reversed chevron; similarly, an IBAC list from 1972 said the lining was blue with a white reversed chevron. Sheard’s “royal blue” probably referred to the lighter and brighter shade of royal blue that began to be popular in the 1950s, not the traditional dark shade of royal blue.