Name-a-Day Calendar, April 28: Mississippi Valley State Delta Devils / Devilettes

Page 173 of 365

Chosen in: The mid-1950s

Chosen by: Unknown

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What we now know as Mississippi Valley State University was established in 1950 as Mississippi Vocational College in what can only be described as an act of institutional racism: the State of Mississippi was aware of the various legal challenges to racially segregated education and established this school in an attempt to prevent Black students from applying to their flagship universities. The state’s largest public universities had traditionally only been open to white students, and while the legislature knew they weren’t going to be able to keep Black students out forever,¹ they were going to try their hardest to mitigate it.

Multiple communities rejected the institution being built in their vicinity, so the state essentially put it in the middle of nowhere, a little ways outside the small town of Itta Bena. This put it firmly within the Mississippi Delta, the region of northwestern Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers.² This explains the “Delta” half of the “Delta Devils” nickname the men’s sports teams seem to have taken on almost immediately after the school’s founding.

I am unfortunately unsure of the origins of the “Devils” half, along with the corresponding “Devilettes” nickname the school’s women’s teams use. Publicly available primary documents from that far in the past are few and far between for most HBCUs, and neither the university library nor their archives responded to my request for information.

The school became Mississippi Valley State College in 1964 and Mississippi Valley State University in 1974. Its current mascot is a costumed devil named Pyro.

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1. Racially segregated education was, of course, deemed unconstitutional in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education.

2. Not to be confused with the actual delta of the Mississippi River, which is in Louisiana