Dozens of students filed out of the Kay Spiritual Center at American University this afternoon in the middle of a town hall meeting set up to address a race-related incident that took place on campus yesterday. With their fists raised in the air, they joined hundreds of others outside for a protest, dubbed the #blackexodus.

The protest, which also consisted of students obtaining university withdrawal forms, was in response to someone hanging bananas from strings shaped like nooses at three locations on campus.

Some of the bananas were marked with the letters AKA, an acronym for the predominantly black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. The incident took place on the same day that Taylor Dumpson, an AKA member, started her position as student government association president—the first black woman to hold the office in the school’s history.

“It is disheartening and immensely frustrating that we are still dealing with this issue after recent conversations, dialogues, and town halls surrounding race relations on campus,” Dumpson said in a statement yesterday.

This isn’t the first such incident at the university, though. Back in September, a black student said someone threw a rotten banana into her dorm room. And on the same day, and another black student said someone placed a rotten banana in front of her dorm room and drew obscene images on her chalk board.

A black student leader told NBC Washington reporter Tom Lynch that students walked out of today’s town hall meeting because outgoing president Neil Kerwin was unable to provide them with specific actions that the university would implement on campus to address racist issues.

Kerwin called yesterday’s incident a “crude and racially insensitive act of bigotry” in a message to students. “I regret this happened, apologize to everyone offended, and state emphatically that this incident does not reflect what American University truly is.” He said that the department of public safety is investigating the case.

In another act of defiance, a student posted a video on Facebook showing her peers “doing a mass withdraw” from the university. “Students demanded direct action from admin, expulsion of offending students, hiring more black & POC professors, increasing student of color admissions, divesting from fossil fuel, and divesting from Israel,” she wrote.

While NBC’s Lynch, who is a student at AU, was able to record much of today’s unrest, the university reportedly blocked multiple media outlets from campus. Officials from AU have not yet returned a request for comment.

Update 5:30 p.m.: American University has announced a $1,000 reward for information related to the incident, and has released two videos that show a person of interest.

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