Streeter: What happened with the UMD club tennis team wasn’t a joke. The perpetrators need to go.

In the summer of 1989, a well-meaning but upset older lady at my church told my mother I shouldn’t go to the University of Maryland, my dream school.

“You cannot send your daughter to that racist place!” she insisted. My mom tried to explain that I’d chosen College Park for the journalism school, but the lady remained unconvinced.

I went anyway and learned the skills to help me become the journalist I am today. Still, I understood the university’s troubled racial history — it didn’t graduate its first Black woman until 1959, just 30 years before I set foot on campus. I really wanted to believe that, 33 years after my own graduation, things were so much better.

And then came the Maryland flag festooned with Ku Klux Klan hoods.

The university’s club tennis team was suspended indefinitely this month after members sent a Google document that included the vile image to other teams, including Howard University, a historically Black school.

There’s now an active investigation, and the team apologized on Instagram after pushback from Howard. But no individual member of the team has been singled out and specifically punished for their actions.

That’s not good enough.

The culprits should be named, be they students, staff or faculty. And, when they are, they should be permanently banished. Gone. They need to have an example made of them. That’s not going to stop people from being racist or stupid, but it might convince them to go back into the racism closet.

I asked Rebecca Aloisi, senior director of university communications, what the possible punishments on the table were, including expulsion, but she declined to comment further, given the ongoing investigation. Instead, she referred me to an Oct. 13 statement from President Darryll J. Pines, detailing the team’s suspension and the referral of the incident to the Office of Civil Rights & Sexual Misconduct.

“We seek justice in the context of a legal system that provides few consequences for hate speech, and one power we have as a society is to never allow hate of any form to be normalized and accepted,” he wrote.

That’s great. What are you going to do about it?

When I first saw the image, originally used in a piece about the Confederate history of the state flag, I chuckled bitterly. In context it’s jarring and powerful, but out of context it’s just juvenile, the kind of blatant thing a seventh grader would leave on your locker and snicker. That doesn’t make it any less evil.

This is not the foolish act of young people who manage to get the benefit of the doubt people who look like me never do. This is a deliberate act of hate, and there should be harsh examples made of everyone involved.

“You cannot claim you want to create a healthy and nice and good and fair learning environment when you are protecting these people,” UMD senior and campus activist Jade Blackmoore said.

She and other students were scheduled to hold a town hall Thursday for Black student groups to lay out their demands, including publicly naming the students responsible and expelling them. They also want to establish concrete punishment for future racial actions, along with mandatory racial and cultural sensitivity training for each incoming student.

There has to be a reckoning, but what that looks like remains to be seen. President Pines said he doesn’t want this sort of behavior to be normalized, but I contend that it already has been. Sending that image in a way that can be traced back to the club is not only blisteringly idiotic but brazen.

Don’t let them get away with it.

Stephen B. Thomas, a UMD professor of health policy and management and the director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity, said that this happening in this state, at this school, with its complicated history, is an opportunity to have a conversation that must be heeded.

“We can say ‘Let’s settle this right here,’” said Thomas, the interim director of the campus’ Nyumburu Cultural Center, which since 1971 has offered Black students, including myself, a space for connection.

Racist incidents come up too often on campus. In 2021, a former UMD student with white supremacist ties was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing in 2017 a Black Army lieutenant on campus who was days from graduating from Bowie State University.

The obvious, naked racism is not just an isolated issue at one school, or in one state, but those roots are deep at the University of Maryland, as the insistent church lady attested. Its founder, Charles Benedict Calvert, owned slaves. It didn’t admit its first Black student, eventually Maryland’s first Black U.S. congressman, Parren J. Mitchell, until 1950. The school still didn’t want him to attend the College Park campus, but he insisted and was eventually allowed to.

The first Black woman to graduate, Baltimore native Elaine Johnson Coates, said in a 2019 interview that, in her four years on campus, no one would talk to her unless they were hurling racial slurs.

I don’t remember blatant slurs flung at me, but some white dormmates were surprised that a Black girl from Baltimore had parents who were married. One guy assumed that I, 30 pounds overweight, had an athletic scholarship. I couldn’t possibly have gotten into the same school as him academically.

At an event last year, Blackmoore met Black alumni who told her, “‘It’s so messed up. All the things you guys are dealing with, we dealt with 30, 40, 50 years ago.’ That’s why we’re fighting so hard.”

Thomas said he thinks the students’ demands are on target but fears someone is bound to be disappointed. “If they’re not calling for heads to roll, or expulsion, it’s going to be seen as capitulation,” he said.

This conversation has to stay front and center in the mainstream, because, until someone is found responsible, it can’t be on the backs of Black students to make that happen.

If there is not swift and dramatic punishment to act as a strong and brutal deterrent to this kind of heinous offense, it’s going to keep happening. We need to make racists fear consequences again.