Name-a-Day Calendar, February 4: Florida State Seminoles
Page 90 of 365
Chosen in: 1947
Chosen by: Student body vote
What is now Florida State University has gone through many institutional phases throughout its 17-decade history. It was first established as a coeducational school by an 1851 act of the Legislature of the State of Florida. It operated thusly for half a century and started a football program in 1902, but the football team didn’t even get a chance to adopt a nickname before a 1905 act of the Legislature changed the landscape of higher education in the entire state. The Buckman Act, as it was named, designated some other school in Gainesville to be the primary college for white men and revised Florida State’s charter to make it a white women’s college.1
After World War II, a whole bunch of veterans were looking for a higher education and almost all of them were men. The G.I. Bill made this incredibly easy for them, so a lot of state university systems quickly became overloaded and Florida’s was no exception. In 1947, the Legislature re-revised Florida State’s charter to reallow white men.2 The football program would be revived immediately and this time it’d have a name. The student body came together to vote on a nickname after the second game of the 1947 football season and they came up with some rather varied suggestions. Crackers, Fighting Warriors, Rebels, and Tarpons gave way to the two finalists: Statesmen and eventual winner Seminoles.
We don’t know who exactly suggested the nickname but we do know why: the Seminole Tribe of Florida is famously the only Native American tribe to never be conquered by the United States. This has always been a point of pride for many Floridians and the name was selected to honor the tribe.
It took a little while for the Florida State community’s depictions of Seminole culture to match reality, but by the 1970s, the Seminole Tribe of Florida was fully involved in helping the university treat the name with dignity and respect. In 1978, the tribe endorsed the iconic tradition3 of a Chief Osceola impersonator riding onto the field on a horse named Renegade and planting a flaming spear at midfield.
Not everyone approves of such traditions, but the Seminole Tribe of Florida has never wavered in their support. In 2005, when the NCAA mandated that all member school usage of Native American nicknames and imagery must be officially sanctioned, the tribe put their support in writing.
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This act also established what is now Florida A&M University as the preeminent college for Black students in Florida.
Integration wouldn’t come until 1963.
There exist probably millions of videos of this I could have chosen from. I chose this particular one because I happened to be at the game.