Name-a-Day Calendar, May 17: Nicholls Colonels

Page 192 of 365

Chosen in: 1956

Chosen by: The Student Government Association, with a possible assist from librarian’s assistant Muriel Rogan

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In 1948, the Louisiana State University (LSU) system established a junior college in the Bayou region and named it for Francis Redding Tillou Nicholls, a former Louisiana governor (and Confederate Army brigadier general, but they don’t really like to bring that up). The Louisiana State Legislature split this school from LSU in 1956, upgraded it to a four-year college, and renamed it Francis T. Nicholls State College.

In this school’s early days, going back to their junior college years, participation in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) was required as part of the curriculum. Thus, when the Student Government Association was asked to pick a mascot upon the school’s separation from LSU in 1956, they overwhelmingly selected “Colonels”, as the Cadet Colonel is the highest achievable rank in the ROTC.

By this time, depictions of a colonel to represent Nicholls State were already in circulation, including one particularly well known cartoon named Colonel Nick, drawn by librarian’s assistant Muriel Rogan. Nicholls State cycled through a few more depictions of their colonel mascot before landing on Colonel Tillou, named for the school’s namesake, in 1962.

This mascot (and its ensuing logos) were dressed in gray, the school’s primary color. This was also the color Confederate soldiers wore in the Civil War. It’s unclear if this was intentional or just a poor coincidence, as the mascot didn’t use any other overtly Confederate imagery, but eventually the visual of a mascot named after a Confederate general wearing Confederate gray became too much to bear.

In 2003, Paul Hypolite Jr., the president of the Nicholls chapter of the NAACP, began a push to change not the nickname itself, but how it was depicted. Despite some opposition, university president Steven Hulbert came down on Hypolite’s side in 2004 and retired the 1962 version of Colonel Tillou, at the same time stating that the school’s mascot would still be the colonel and the mascot’s name would still be Colonel Tillou.

After five whole years of mulling things over, focus grouping possible new mascots, the whole nine yards, Nicholls’ new and improved Colonel Tillou debuted in 2009. You don’t need me to tell you that a lot of the community hates this mascot and what it represents, but it remains the mascot to this day.

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P.S. In 1950, Francis T. Nicholls Junior College fielded a football team nicknamed the Buccaneers. This team was unsuccessful and disbanded after one season. I have excluded it from the body of this text because it was entirely divorced from the school’s modern athletic programs and would have interrupted the flow of the story.