University of Southern Mississippi

Mississippi

1910

Formerly “Mississippi Normal College”, “Mississippi State Teachers College”, and “Mississippi Southern College”

official hood lining pattern
A 1940s or 1950s wool beanie cap or "dink" for Mississippi Southern College in the University of Southern Mississippi archives.
A pennant from the 1950s, featuring the original college seal.

During the first half of the 20th century the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) kept a list of the school colors of various colleges and universities and recorded this information as a generic hood lining description in the Bureau’s files, usually as a standard “chevron pattern” hood lining (e.g., “crimson with a white chevron”, “yellow with a green chevron”, “dark blue with a gold chevron”, etc.). These generic descriptions are responsible for the majority of the duplicate hood linings that appear in the published IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948. If a school contacted the Intercollegiate Bureau to request an official hood lining pattern and sent the Bureau color samples so that the precise shades of the school’s colors could be ascertained, the Bureau would assign a unique lining pattern to the school, which would replace the generic description in the IBAC record for that college or university.

Sometimes a school would independently adopt a hood lining without authorization from the Intercollegiate Bureau. In these cases the IBAC would add this information to its files, often altering the pattern slightly to avoid duplicating a hood lining the Bureau had already officially approved. This situation became more common in the 1950s and 1960s as the influence of the Intercollegiate Bureau began to wane. What this means is that today it is difficult to know whether a new hood lining for a particular college that appears in an IBAC list from the 1960s or 1970s had been officially authorized by the Bureau, or if the college had independently designed its hood lining and the Bureau simply transcribed that information from another source into the IBAC records.

The history of the University of Southern Mississippi’s academic hood lining illustrates how complicated this could get. A generic “black with gold chevron” hood lining description was cited in an IBAC list from 1969. However, the university must have been independently using a unique pattern during the late 1940s or 1950s, because a compilation of hood lining information earlier published by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Southern Mississippi’s hood lining as “Spanish yellow” with a reversed black chevron.

black
gold

The adoption of school colors was a topic of much discussion among students of Mississippi Normal College during the 1910-1911 school year. They wanted colors that no other Mississippi college or university was using, so a committee was formed in 1912 to research this matter and recommend school colors for the college. Florence Burrow Pope, a member of that committee, was inspired by the beauty of the Black-Eyed Susan flowers growing near the campus, so she suggested black and gold. Another girl on the committee suggested maroon and gray. The two color combinations were forwarded to the student body, who voted to make black and gold the official colors of Mississippi Normal College.

A photograph from an 1895 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue of a bachelor's hood. The photograph has been altered to illustrate a hood lined with two reversed chevrons.

Not long after the inaccurate 1969 IBAC entry for Southern Mississippi’s hood lining was published, the university must have sent color samples to the Bureau with a description of the hood lining it was using. Realizing that “Spanish yellow” was nothing more than a romantic name for “gold”, the Intercollegiate Bureau became aware that Mississippi Southern’s unauthorized hood lining was identical to the hood lining the IBAC had already assigned to West Liberty University (gold with a reversed black chevron). To correct this problem, the Bureau added a second chevron to Southern Mississippi’s hood lining, creating a pattern Sheard described in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) as “Spanish gold” with two reversed black chevrons. The IBAC used less florid prose: a 1972 list from the Bureau simply described the university’s hood as “gold” with two reversed black chevrons.