For the past seven years the University of Mississippi has been mascot-less.

Why? Well, the school’s beloved Colonel Reb was banned in 2003, due to the fact that he was, as the Associated Press aptly called him, “a caricature of a white plantation owner.”

Tomorrow, students will be able to vote on what their new mascot will be (our guess is something a little bit more politically correct) or continue to live without a fuzzy creature or historical figure to represent them.

“We’re tired of having nothing to represent us,” junior Josh Hinton, a member of the Associated Student Body, which approved a resolution calling for the vote. “We’ve gotten our song taken away. We want to have some kind of tradition back.”

And at a school known for its tense racial relations, (everyone remembers the deadly riot that erupted in 1962 when James Meredith’s tried to enter as the university’s first black student) time has come for a change. Once a symbol of the Old South, the Oxford campus has slowly been dropping old traditions.

The Confederate Flag-waving finally disappeared in 1997 — only 132 years after the Confederacy ceased to exist. And last year, the fight song “From Dixie with Love” bit the dust, too. Mostly due to the fan chant “The South will rise again” that followed.

That doesn’t mean that Civil War influence is completely gone, however. The team is still nicknamed the Rebels. And merchandise sporting Colonel Reb can still be purchased.

And some are just not willing to let the Colonel go.

“The majority of students I talked to feel they’d rather have no mascot if they can’t have Colonel Reb, and that’s going to be evident,” Hannah Loy, a senior from Natchez, Miss. She’s part of the Colonel Reb Foundation, which is urging students to vote “no” to a new mascot.

Other universities (and professional sports teams) have also been forced to drop their mascots due to a lack of political correctness.

The University of Illinois, though they remain the Illini, eliminated Chief lliniwek, a student clad in a Native American costume who danced around during sports games.

The NCAA told North Dakota University a few years ago that they needed to obtain approval from Sioux tribes in order to keep their Fighting Sioux.

On the other side of things, Central Michigan has obtained permission from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe to use the Chippewa as their mascot.

And Florida State is famously known for having a good relationship with the Seminole Tribe in Florida. The tribe’s chief has even said it’s an honor for the school to use the Seminole and the Chief Osceola name.

Kind of makes you happy there isn’t a fierce anti-Turtle lobby, doesn’t it?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.