Davidson College
North Carolina
1837
Unhappy with the original college colors of pink and blue, which made rather unintimidating athletic uniforms, students at Davidson College voted to change the college colors to crimson and black in 1895.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): pink/blue (1895); red/black (1917-1935)
Until his death in 1921, Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and a partner in the firm of Cotrell & Leonard, an academic costume manufacturer and the depository for the records of the IBAC. Leonard was a consultant to the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume that drafted the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume in 1895. The Commission sent a copy of this 1895 Intercollegiate Code with a list of college colors to the editor of the 1896 Living Church Quarterly (published in December 1895). Davidson College is among the schools in this college colors list, described as having pink and blue college colors. So Davidson may have been one of the first schools to have been assigned a hood lining by the IBAC. But the arrangement of the pink and blue colors in the college’s hood is not described in this list, and in any event, Davidson changed its colors that same year, which would have required the IBAC to assign a new hood lining to the college.
Davidson College also appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the college’s 1898 Quips and Cranks yearbook, which suggests an IBAC hood assignment for the Davidson by 1897 or 1898 at the latest. Like the list of college colors appended to the 1895 Intercollegiate Code in the 1896 Living Church Quarterly, the advertisement in the 1898 Quips and Cranks yearbook did not describe the heraldic arrangement of Davidson’s crimson and black hood lining.
However, a complete description of the college’s hood was cited in a 1927 IBAC list as being “black, cardinal [not crimson], black, equal parts”. The IBAC introduced a heraldic division they called “equal parts” after 1902; it is a division of the hood lining into three equal parts, usually with a chevron-shaped division of the colors. Essentially it was a division of the hood lining using an extremely wide chevron. The IBAC did not use the “equal parts” division with much frequency, probably because the upper color tended to be hidden when the hood was worn, giving the lining the appearance of being divided per chevron.
It was probably for this reason the IBAC redesigned Davidson’s hood lining. A 1948 IBAC list described Davidson’s hood lining as “black and cardinal”, which was apparently one way the IBAC described a hood lining with the colors divided vertically (per pale). The description would thus be understood to refer to the left and the right side of the hood lining: in this case, black (left side) and cardinal (right side). By the early 1970s the IBAC was describing Davidson as using a single color hood lining of cardinal, but this was a duplication of the single color hood the IBAC had already assigned Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin. Here the late 1940s IBAC assignment has been restored, with the correct crimson shade of red.