Name-a-Day Calendar, March 1: Howard Bison
Page 115 of 365
Chosen in: 1922
Chosen by: Head football coach Edward Morrison
Howard University was established in 1867 and began playing football in 1893. Their first teams struggled to find uniforms, let alone a nickname, so they played shortened schedules without an official moniker for several years.
Howard became a founding member of the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1912, at which point their football program became more established. This process was completed in 1920, when new head coach Edward Morrison finally gave the team a nickname: Thundering Herd. But that wouldn’t last very long.
According to a 2022 story on this topic by Edward Hill Jr. for The Dig, the current nickname “came from a combination of factors”. Evidently, local Native Americans respected some “colored soldiers” in the Civil War enough to call them “Buffalo”. Morrison wasn’t born until 1894, but the story goes that this respect lived on when he served in the Army. When he took the reins of the Howard football team, he eventually called them the American analog to the buffalo: “Bison”. The switch happened in 1922.
The aforementioned story goes into further detail on the history of Howard’s athletic branding and their Bison logo throughout the years, and I highly recommend reading it in full.
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