The University of Maryland (UMD) has indefinitely suspended its club tennis team after a graphic featuring Ku Klux Klan imagery was circulated to other universities ahead of a regional tournament, prompting widespread condemnation.

The controversy erupted after Toni Rachal, president of Howard University’s club tennis team, spotted the offensive material in a shared Google document sent to participating schools before last weekend’s tournament, WUSA9 reported.

The graphic features an altered Maryland state flag incorporating images of Ku Klux Klan hoods. Rachal discovered the image while examining a Google document that had been emailed to the tournament’s participating tennis clubs.

In a letter addressed to UMD, Rachal described the imagery as “associated with racial hatred and intimidation” and called for “meaningful accountability” following the incident, WUSA9 reported.

The tennis club at Howard, an HBCU in Washington DC, released a statement on social media describing the image as “a recognizable symbol associated with the Ku Klux Klan”. It questioned how the image made its way into official tournament materials.

The University of Maryland’s president, Darryll J Pines, said the tennis club “distributed programming material with a graphic containing racist imagery directed at people who are Black or African American”, according to a university statement.

While the incident “may have directly involved only a few student team members”, the university’s recreation and wellness department moved to suspend the entire club indefinitely “pending an administrative investigation by the office of student conduct”, the statement said.

The university’s police department and office of civil rights and sexual misconduct have also launched investigations into the incident.

Bryant Reed, president of the Black student union at UMD, said in a phone interview that Black students at UMD are “extremely disturbed” by the “blatant act of racism” from the school’s tennis club.

“Nobody is comfortable with the fact that something like that happened so openly and so blatantly, and there are some people that are on the tennis team that didn’t know that this was happening that are also extremely disturbed in general about the situation,” he said

Reed also said that he believes this is just one more incident in a longstanding pattern of racism that Black students at the institution face.

“This is definitely not an isolated incident,” he said. “Here at UMD, people often report things like micro-aggressions or just a general feeling of isolation as Black students.

“I can share about a specific instance where a friend of mine was sitting in a residence hall and someone said to him, ‘Oh, you’re the diversity admit,’ and it was blatant, it was random. He didn’t know that person. This is the sort of thing that happens all the time,” he added.

The isolation Black students feel at UMD is reflected even in its demographics. According to the US census, 31% of Maryland residents identify as Black, yet Black students at UMD only make up about 14% of the undergraduate student body.

Aniya Baker, vice-president of the Black student union at UMD, said she feels that officials at the university are not taking the steps necessary for any meaningful change to occur.

“Anytime an issue has been brought up on campus where it’s specifically targeting Black students, I do not feel like our concerns were actually taken seriously,” Baker said.

She gave an example of a Black student facing discrimination last year, and the union responded by informing the institution’s student government association (SGA), which Baker said would not even release a public statement to students acknowledging the situation. “That’s just one of many instances where Black students were just being ignored,” she said.

And unlike the SGA, the Black student union does not have relationship with the university’s administration, which she said puts the organization “at a disadvantage when it comes to issues that are surfacing in the Black community because we do not readily have access towards our administrators, which I feel is extremely unfair”.

Reed said that the university making an effort to involve itself more in the spaces of Black students is the first step at improving conditions. The institution’s vice-president of student affairs did reach out to the union immediately following news of the incident, which the union said it appreciated, but still feels more concrete action needs to be taken for things to get better.

The tennis tournament proceeded with the remaining participating teams, but Maryland’s team withdrew from competition and forfeited its matches. Howard’s club tennis team went on to reach the tournament semi-finals, marking its strongest performance in the event since the organization was established in 2021.

The Maryland club remains suspended indefinitely as university officials investigate the distribution of the racist image.