blackride

English

Etymology

black +‎ ride

Noun

blackride (plural blackrides)

1. A student prank in the early 1800s that involved students wearing red coats, blackening their faces, and riding about campus with torches at night on horses stolen from the faculty.
   • 1910, The Sewanee Review - Volume 18, page 337:

     The "blackride" was after this manner: four or five riders, half masked, with their faces blacked, and their bodies dressed in red flannel coats, with flaming torches of camphene in their hands, galloped furiously up and down the campus, waving their flambeaux; the students crowding out of their rooms, yelled at the top of their lungs, and assembled just outside the campus gateway, to give the riders concealment in the heart of the throng when they dismounted and turned the horses over to livery servants who took them back to the stables;

   • 1944, Albea Godbold, The Church College of the Old South, page 175:

     Charles Woodward Hutson, of the class of 1860 at the University of South Carolina, would have nothing to do with attempts to shield students who had participated in a "blackride"; he was disgusted with the rowdyism […]

   • 1952, Edgar Wallace Knight, A Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860:

     Friday night we had a beautiful sight— a blackride in the Campus.

   • 2019, Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson's Education, page 97:

     To rile their professors, South Carolina students staged 'blackrides,' when they blackened their faces, stole the horses of faculty, and galloped about campus while holding flaming torches. After exhausting a horse and drawing a cheering crowd, a 'blackrider' dismounted and slipped into the midst of his fellows to hide from investigation."

Derived terms

• blackrider