Wilberforce University
Ohio
1856
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): green/old gold (1908-1911); green/yellow (1912-1914); green/gold (1915-1916); green/yellow (1917-1918)
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 must have entrusted the IBAC 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).
Detailed historical information about the green and gold school colors of Wilberforce University is not available at this time.
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 represented the first attempt by the IBAC to create a record of hood lining patterns used by American colleges and universities, but unfortunately the list did not identify which institutions on the list had actually applied to the IBAC for a hood lining assignment, nor did 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 green and gold colors of Wilberforce University appeared 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 Wilberforce was a client of that firm, the IBAC is likely to have registered a hood lining pattern for the university in 1895 or 1896.
Western Maryland College (today McDaniel College) was cited with identical colors in the Committee’s list, so to distinguish between the hood linings of the two schools, the Intercollegiate Bureau apparently assigned Wilberforce a hood lined gold with a green chevron and Western Maryland a hood lined green with a gold chevron.
The first complete IBAC description of Wilberforce University’s hood appeared in 1927, where it was stated to have a gold lining with an olive green chevron, an IBAC description that does not change in subsequent lists. Why the Bureau used this dark shade of green for Wilberforce’s chevron instead of the university’s correct shade of medium green (or “true green”) is a mystery, but it is possible that Wilberforce had sent the Bureau a color sample that was atypically dark green.
Here the correct shade of Wilberforce green has been used for the chevron in the university’s hood lining.