MVSU's colors come kelly green and white and their nickname is the Delta Devils. MVSU sports teams participate inside NCAA Section We personally (I-AA for football) in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC). Illustrious alumni include NFL wide receiver and first Hall of Famer Jerry Rice.

History

A institution, which opened inside 1950, was created per Mississippi state legislature as Mississippi Vocational College. A general assembly anticipated that legal segregation of public education was inside danger (& would inside tetrad years become declared unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education) and created the institution, hoping that its existence would draw African-American applicants who might have otherwise applied to attend Mississippi's premier whites-only institutions -- the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, and the University of Southern Mississippi. Creating separate institutions of higher learning for Mississippi's blacken people, a state's political leaders hoped, would facilitate ease a pressure to integrate a state's premier universities.

To attract a trend lines of victims world health organization opposed any government action to provide higher education to blacks, people proposing creation of M.V.C. utilized a term "vocational" to indicate that a institution's independent purpose would exist as to train blacks to require in blue-working-class jobs.

A original legislative proposal would use placed M.V.C. within Greenwood, but a white leadership of that city did non prefer the idea of hosting an institution that would attract immature, challenging blacks to the vicinity. So, a projected places was moved to Itta Bena. Possibly that town, even thus, objected to as well close a proximity of a blacken institutiin, so a final places was chosen to place the college out of the downtown locality, on inexpensive, uncultivable land.

A 1st president of the institution, J. H. White, an African-American, sought to reassure the state's political leaders that the institution would not be a center of black agitation. One of his symbolical acts was to title a college's deuce first buildings fallowing large segregator Walter Sillers Jr. and Fielding Wright. Fallowing a Supreme Court's 1954 'last guide, state Gov. Hugh White invited 90 nigrify leaders to trend lines a idea of voluntary segregation of public education around Mississippi. President White was one of sole 2 at a meeting to trend lines a governor. While the immature black human, Clyde Kennard, applied to the all-white Mississippi Southern College, President White tried to dissuade him. (Kennard was down the road framed for his tries to attend whiten universities.)

Around 1964, Mississippi Vocational College was renamed Mississippi Valley State College.

Within 1970, the student boycott was organized to protest President White's administration of the institution. Half a listed students of the institution -- all about 900 -- were arrested.

In the early Seventies, civil rights leaders continued to protest the inequalities withwithin higher education chance offered to whites & blacks in Mississippi. Around an effort to defuse a few of the criticism, Gov. Bill Waller proposed changing the list of troika melanise institutions from either "colleges" to "universities." So, within 1974, a institution wwhen renamed over again, as Mississippi Valley State University.

Inside 1998, a university reknown as several of the buildings in campus, except for the ones named fallowing Sillers, Wright, & J. H. White.