Black is a traditional (albeit antique) football color for this program.
Check out any edition of The Volunteer, circa 1910 or thereabouts, and then look up the athletics section. What you'll see are Tennessee football players wearing black jerseys with orange stripes.
Some of our early coaches were Princeton grads, so the earliest standardized jersey we had at Tennessee was basically the Princeton jersey.
This isn't a defacement of the temple going on here. We're simply going in this instance to an old jersey color we were using for decades before we chose the orange.