How a forgotten illustration led to UMD club tennis team’s suspension

Content warning: This story contains an offensive image.

At first, Benjamin Jancewicz didn’t know what was happening.

The graphic illustrator based in Ottawa, Canada, began getting messages on Tuesday morning about an illustration he had created nearly 10 years ago for a blog post examining the Confederate symbols in the Maryland state flag.

“I really hadn’t heard anyone talk about the graphic since 2017,” Jancewicz said. “And then this morning, I started getting alerts and tons of people messaging me.”

The image caused a firestorm this week when the University of Maryland, College Park, club tennis team republished it in promotional materials for a tournament they hosted over the weekend. The image replaces the red-and-white Crossland coat of arms in the state flag with images of Ku Klux Klan hoods.

The university suspended the entire club team indefinitely, and a club tennis team at Howard University, along with Howard’s president, called for accountability.

“The imagery is a recognizable symbol of white supremacy, organized hate and violence,” members of the Howard club tennis team wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

Jancewicz said he was “horrified” that the club tennis team used his image in this way and omitted all of the context he’d originally published along with it.

“I don’t understand how anybody could have seen that and thought it was a good idea to send to all of the clubs,” he said. “I’m shocked that it’s being used as a potential hate symbol.”

Jancewicz, who lived in Baltimore and was a Maryland resident for two decades, said he created the illustration in 2017 as a commentary on the history of the Maryland state flag.

The blog post where he published it explained that the black and gold portion of the flag was used by the Union during the Civil War, while the Confederate army and its sympathizers in Maryland used the white and red Crossland coat of arms. After the war ended, the state put the two sides together to try to make peace and sow unity.

Jancewicz made the altered image of the state flag to show the connection to the confederacy, he said.

At the time, he recalled, the article “went pretty viral.” After his post was published, a conservative group in the state created a petition to save the Maryland flag. Jancewicz said he’d never suggested getting rid of it.

Gov. Larry Hogan even waded into the debate, stating that as long as he was governor, the flag would remain.

“A lot happened in 2017,” Jancewicz said with a laugh. “But then the article went quiet and I hadn’t heard much about it since.”

He said he has no idea how the University of Maryland club tennis team found the image nearly a decade later.

“The only way to find the illustration is if you search something like ‘racist Maryland Flag,’” he said. “It’s kind of hard to get to, being almost a decade old.”

He reached out to the Howard University club tennis team via Instagram to explain why the graphic was created and to apologize, he said.

“The intention of this illustration was to highlight the history of racism in Maryland and how it affects Maryland today,” he said. “It’s clear from the uproar that we still have a lot of work to do.”

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