Livingstone College
North Carolina
1879
Livingstone College students adopted sky blue and black school colors in 1910.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): black/sky blue (1923-1931); black/light blue (1934-1935)
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 gown 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 probably would have been some of the first to have had hood lining patterns assigned to them.
Livingstone College was mentioned in “The Cap and Gown in America” as having adopted academic costume, so the Intercollegiate Bureau is likely to have assigned a hood lining pattern to the college in 1895 or soon after. Livingstone’s colors at that time and the arrangement of those colors in the lining of the hood were not cited until a 1927 IBAC list that described the college’s hood as black with a light blue chevron. These colors had become the school colors of Livingstone College in 1910.
Unfortunately this design was indistinguishable from the hood lining the Bureau had earlier assigned to Jefferson Medical College in 1896 (black with a sky blue chevron), so by 1972 the Intercollegiate Bureau had interchanged the colors of Livingstone’s hood lining to light blue with a black chevron.