University of South Carolina – Columbia
South Carolina
1801
Tea green and cardinal red were the original colors of the University of South Carolina, but in the 1890s they began to fall out of favor.
Students first wore striped garnet and black caps to a football game in December 1892, and a professor named J. William Flinn presented a banner in these colors to the USC football team in 1895. The university yearbook was first published in 1899 and was called the Garnet and Black.
So even though they had never been officially approved, in 1900 garnet and black became the de facto official colors of the university when the students voted down a proposal to change them.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): tea green/cardinal red (1895); garnet/black (1909-1935)
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) may have assigned the University of South Carolina a hood lining in the late 1890s but this is not certain. A 1927 IBAC list described the university’s hood lining as garnet with a black chevron, an arrangement that did not change in subsequent Intercollegiate Bureau lists.