By 1969, activists at Dartmouth College pushed to change the school's nickname of Indians. The pressure worked, as Dartmouth became known as the Big Green.
Along the way several schools followed suit, retiring mascots such as Oklahoma's Little Red. In 1971, Marquette abandoned use of its Willie Wampum mascot; and before the 1994 season, the school changed its Warriors nickname to Golden Eagles.
American Indian students at Stanford were successful in getting the school to drop its Indians nickname in 1972. The Pac-10 school is now known as the Cardinal.
The NCAA began applying heat in recent years.
"I think member institutions now understand the seriousness of this issue," Robert Vowels, commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference and chairman of the NCAA's minority opportunities and interests committee, told USA Today in May.
"People are telling you that in some instances it's hurtful, it's discriminatory, it's degrading. When you have those types of issues and sentiments coming out, you have to take a serious look at it."
The NCAA said Friday nicknames or mascots deemed "hostile or abusive" would not be allowed on team uniforms beginning with any NCAA tournament after Feb. 1.
In the late 1980s, public school systems began investigating individual nicknames. In 1988 the Minnesota State Board of Education adopted a resolution that stated the "use of mascots, emblems, or symbols depicting American Indian culture or race [is] unacceptable" and encouraged all districts to immediately proceed to remove offending mascots and nicknames.
That same year, more than 20 public schools in Wisconsin dropped American Indian nicknames. The National Education Association, the largest democratic education organization of its kind in the world, passed resolutions in 1991 and '92 denouncing usage of ethnic related sports team mascots, symbols and nicknames.
The Atlanta Braves' ascent in baseball and resulting increased national television exposure - and their fans' penchant for the "tomahawk chop" - helped put the issue back in the spotlight.
News media organizations have jumped aboard in the last 15 years. In 1992 the Portland Oregonian announced it would no longer use Redskins and other related terms in print. The Salt Lake Tribune adopted a similar policy in the 1990s, but later discontinued it.
In 1993, the National Congress of American Indians issued a resolution that "denounces the use of any American Indian name or artifice associated with team mascots."
In 1997, the Los Angeles school district - the nation's second largest - began to eliminate Indian nicknames in its jurisdiction. The next year, a federal judge upheld the school board's decision to eliminate the mascots and nicknames.
