I think suspending him was silly. Sitting down and talking to him probably would have accomplished a lot more
I went to a private school in FL and we had 3 black people in our school - 2 guys and a girl. One of the guys won Homecoming King and came dressed on costume day (it was an Episcopalian school - we celebrated Mardi Gras and had a week or two of "celebrations"
) as a KKK member. This was back in the mid 70's where everyone wasn't so PC....
We knew the black kids were black, but we didn't care - they didn't try to claim they were"different" so they never got treated differently.