Johnson C. Smith University
North Carolina
1867
Formerly “Biddle University”
Cotrell & Leonard was a 19th century academic costume manufacturing firm that supplied caps, gowns, and hoods to most of the prestigious colleges and universities in the US. Gardner Cotrell Leonard, one of the partners in this firm, was Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization founded in 1887 to compile data on European and American academic costume. Leonard was also a consultant to the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume, which on 16 May 1895 approved a voluntary system of academic costume that quickly became the standard followed by most American colleges and universities.
Two years before the Intercollegiate Code was created, Leonard wrote an article called “The Cap and Gown in America” for the December 1893 issue of The University Magazine. In this article Leonard described various types of caps and gowns currently used by American colleges and universities, and encouraged more schools to adopt academic costume. In this article Leonard mentioned several institutions that used cap and gown; these were no doubt clients of the Cotrell & Leonard firm where he worked. So when the 1895 Intercollegiate Code was authorized and the IBAC began assigning hood lining patterns for each college or university that adopted the Code, clients of Cotrell & Leonard would probably have been some of the first to have had hood lining patterns assigned to them.
In 1895 a committee of three students, supervised by a faculty member, selected gold and blue as the colors of Biddle University. Gold symbolized “steadfastness to the individual” and blue symbolized “loyalty to the cause or school”. The shade of blue was navy, and was sometimes called “admiral blue”.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/gold (1934-1935)
Biddle University was mentioned in “The Cap and Gown in America” as having adopted academic costume, so the IBAC is likely to have assigned a hood lining pattern to the university in 1895 or soon after. But Biddle’s colors and the arrangement of those colors in the lining of the hood were not cited until a 1927 IBAC list that described the university’s hood as Yale blue with a gold chevron. But this same list – compiled just two years after Biddle changed its name – cited Johnson C. Smith University as having gold with a navy blue chevron.
The latter design is preferable, as the hood the Intercollegiate Bureau had assigned to Biddle was a duplicate of the hood the IBAC had assigned to Vincennes University in Indiana. The Bureau must have realized this and reassigned Johnson C. Smith University a unique hood lining between 1923 and 1925 that was not being used by any other college or university.