Name-a-Day Calendar, June 12: Ole Miss Rebels
Page 218 of 365
Chosen in: 1936
Chosen by: Judge Ben Guider via a community-wide competition
The University of Mississippi, commonly known as Ole Miss, was established in 1844 and began playing football in 1893. The school’s teams had no official nickname for more than 40 years after they began playing. In the late 1920s, some people tried to make “Mississippi Flood” catch on, but it never did.
In 1936, student newspaper The Mississippian1 sought to change that and sponsored a community-wide nickname contest. The details of the contest are somewhat murky, but the gist of it is this: the contest received more than 600 entries, which the Mississippian staff whittled down to five finalists to send to sportswriters. Those finalists were “Confederates”, “Raiders”, “Rebels”, “Stonewalls”, and an option to choose no nickname and be known simply as “Ole Miss”. These five suggestions were sent to 42 noteworthy sportswriters across the South, who were asked to list their first, second, and third favorite choices; the nickname that tickled the fancy of the most sportswriters would be the winner.
Of those 42 sportswriters, just 21 filled out their ballots, but even then, the winner was clear. “Rebels”, a nickname suggested by Judge Ben Guider of Vicksburg, received 18 first-place votes. The University Athletic Committee made it official and that was that.
You might recognize that pretty much all of those nickname finalists, including the winner, are overt references to Mississippi’s legacy as a Confederate state in the Civil War. People have, of course, asked the university to consider changing the nickname on countless occasions, but Ole Miss hasn’t budged.
Two recent events show that the tide is changing at least a little. First, Ole Miss gradually replaced their longtime Colonel Reb mascot with a mascot that bore no resemblance to it in name or appearance. In 2010, the university nixed Colonel Reb for a black bear named Rebel Black Bear;2 then, in 2018, they got rid of the bear and replaced it with Tony the Landshark.
Second, in summer 2020, at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests, Ole Miss Esports announced they were removing all references to “Rebels” from their branding, making them the first Ole Miss sports program to ever do so. Their president, Sergio Brack, questioned: “If you can alter something to make something seem more inclusive to the people around you, why would you not?”
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This paper is now known as The Daily Mississippian.
Colonel Reb had not been seen on the sidelines since 2003, but the switch didn’t happen until 2010.