University of Mississippi
Mississippi
1848
Royal purple was the college color for the University of Mississippi in the late 19th century, but crimson and (dark) blue were chosen by Mississippi’s football team for its uniforms in 1893 because these were the colors of Harvard and Yale, each known for its gridiron prowess. These athletic colors were made the official academic colors of the university in 1900 or 1901, as the first reference to crimson and blue is in the 1902 edition of the World Almanac, which was compiled in 1901. The university’s nickname is “The Rebels”, and red and blue are also the two major colors in the Confederate battle flags that are often flown at football games.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): royal purple (1896-1900); crimson/blue (1902); red/blue (1912-1935)
On 16 May 1895, the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of academic costume for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The Intercollegiate Code stipulated that the college color or colors of the institution granting the degree would be used in the lining of the institution’s hood but did not define how multiple colors would be combined in the hood lining.
One of the advisors to the Commission was Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization affiliated with the academic costume manufacturing firm Cotrell & Leonard. Since 1887 the IBAC had maintained a database of information about academic regalia in the US and Europe, so the Commission entrusted the Bureau with the responsibility of assigning a unique hood lining design to every college and university that chose to adopt the Intercollegiate Code.
The Commission sent a copy of the Intercollegiate Code along with a list of schools and their colors to the Living Church Quarterly, which included this information in its 1896 edition (published in December 1895). The list of college colors the Commission appended to the Intercollegiate Code was largely copied from the 1894 World Almanac. But some colleges and universities in the Commission’s list do not appear in the World Almanac, so information about these colors was probably supplied by Cotrell & Leonard from their client records. The Commission’s list of college colors represents the first attempt by the IBAC to create a record of hood linings used by American colleges and universities, but unfortunately the list does not identify which institutions on the list had actually applied to the IBAC for a hood lining assignment, nor does it describe the heraldic patterns the IBAC used to divide the colors within those hoods. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the IBAC assigned hood lining designs to the clients of Cotrell & Leonard in the Commission’s list as early as 1895 or within a few years after that.
The royal purple color of the University of Mississippi appears in the Commission’s list but not in the 1894 World Almanac, which means Cotrell & Leonard probably supplied this color information to the Commission. And since Mississippi was a client of that firm, the Intercollegiate Bureau is likely to have registered a hood lining pattern for the university c.1895-96. It is unknown what hood lining design the IBAC assigned Mississippi, because there were other schools with identical or similar colors in the Committee’s list, including Cornell College in Iowa (purple), McKendree College (royal purple), Racine College (royal purple), and Williams College (royal purple).
The first complete Intercollegiate Bureau description of Mississippi’s hood did not appear until 1927, where it was cited as having a bright red lining with a navy blue chevron. Identical descriptions appear in 1948 and 1972 IBAC lists. “Bright red” was a synonym the IBAC often used for scarlet, which means the fabric sample Mississippi sent to the IBAC was brighter than the Harvard crimson that inspired Mississippi’s color, but “navy blue” would be an accurate description of Yale blue. A 1969 IBAC list described the same hood design using a different description of the university’s dark blue: bright red with a “royal blue” chevron.
Correcting the Bureau’s bright red shade to a more accurate shade of Mississippi’s crimson would make the university’s hood lining pattern too similar to the hood lining the IBAC already assigned to the University of Pennsylvania (cardinal with a navy blue chevron). So to retain the original shades of crimson and dark blue for Mississippi while avoiding a duplication of Pennsylvania’s hood, here the dark blue chevron in Mississippi’s crimson hood lining has been inverted.