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Hail To Black:
NU's Long Association with Its Alternate Color

As the Wildcats continue to sport their Gothic uniforms in multiple sports, the athletic program is occasionally criticized for wearing "BFBS"-- or "Black For Black's Sake" (uni-watch.com often does this, citing NU as one of the earliest BFBS teams). "Our colors are purple and white, not purple and black!" is a common complaint.

Well, not so fast. The story of NU's school and team colors is a complex one, and black has almost always been a part of that story.

Originally, the school had no interest in a unifying set of colors. For decades, the individual classes picked out colors-- for example, the class of 1872 voted royal purple as its color, but other classes employed a spectrum of various colors. When NU began to play sports with teams from outside the university, beginning with baseball in the early 1870s, it used uniforms with arbitrary colors. For example, the early baseball teams sometimes wore white with brown trim. The early football teams of 1876 and 1878 wore no standard uniform at all.

The first attempt at a school color came during the buildup to the Racine-Michigan football game in May 1879. NU students wanted to represent the school in the stands in Chicago, but wanted a color to unify the school beyond the class-assigned colors. Some students chose light blue for the color, but that did not take hold following the game.

1879: BLACK AND GOLD

Upon returning to campus that fall, the students finally did take a formal vote for a university color. Initially wanting just one, they couldn't choose between black and gold, so they voted for both, making black and gold the school's new colors.

Almost immediately, however, the color combo met with resistance. Some students opposed the new colors because they believed they copied those of other universities. It should be noted that Purdue was not one of these schools-- Purdue would not employ black and gold until 1887. The students strangely cited Princeton, mistakenly thinking that the Tigers used black and gold.

1879: PURPLE AND GOLD

So, in October 1879, the students voted again and chose purple and gold as the school's colors. The athletic teams, including baseball and football, immediately began wearing the new colors. By 1890, the football team wore purple and gold-striped caps and purple silk shirts under their canvas football vests.

1892: PURPLE ALONE

By 1892, however, NU wanted to emulate the prestigious East Coast schools, most of which used just one school color. The school formally dropped gold, making purple its sole color and the main symbol of the university. Initially, this move also had opposition, since Williams College also used just purple.

The school's academic regalia, however, remained purple and gold for years, before white began replacing gold gradually as a secondary color. However, neither the students nor the administration ever made white a formal school color. Even though the university's English lyrics to the Alma Mater mention, "Hail to White," Northwestern's only formal color is purple. White, gold, and-- yes-- even black remained complimentary colors.

BLACK REMAINED FOR DECADES

Despite the change to purple and gold in 1879, black remained a component in NU's athletic look for long afterward. The team occasionally wore black pants in the late 1890s. The program used black and purple banners and other regalia in the 1910s. When leather helmets were introduced, NU sometimes wore plain helmets, sometimes dyed them dark purple, and-- starting in 1901-- occasionally dyed them black.

NU used black helmets, from time to time, all the way to 1954, when it switched to a white shell helmet. With that switch, the team would not use black again for nearly forty years.

BARNETT AND BFBS

Gary Barnett brought back the black in a big way in 1992, switching the team's jerseys to black for the first time ever. Of course, his reasons had nothing to do with NU's history. He had come from Colorado, and his young son had suggested that Barnett try black and purple uniforms. The players loved them, and so the look stuck for a decade.

Randy Walker brought back purple jerseys, but still occasionally used black pants for the uniform. Pat Fitzgerald used a black alternate jersey for the 2010 game at Wrigley Field, and-- with the switch to Under Armour in 2012-- black returned as an occasional color for the football team's unis.

When the Gothics arrived in 2014, however, the black uniforms were, this time, indeed a nod to the school's long association with the color, mimicking the gold and black campus signs, which themselves were associated with NU's earliest color combination.