A black cafeteria worker at Yale University resigned after shattering a historic stained glass window in the school’s Calhoun College residence hall.
The hall, named after slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, features a stained glass design with two slaves carrying bales of cotton. Yale students have long been protesting the slavery-themed art forms at the university and controversy became more heated in April, when Yale President Peter Salovey announced the school will be keeping the Calhoun dorm’s name as part of an obligation to address the “legacy of slavery” rather than ignoring it.
38-year-old Corey Menafee faced felony charges with city police after using a broomstick to knock the glass panel twice to the floor on June 13. Menafee said he was tired of staring at the “racist, very degrading” image and felt the sudden impulse to knock it down during a cleaning routine Monday.
“I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high, and I climbed up and reached up and broke it,” he told the New Haven Independent. “It’s 2016, I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that.”
Following Menafee’s vandalism, Yale’s Head of College Julia Adams announced in an email to the Calhoun residents that the set of stained glass windows that depicted Calhoun’s life would be removed due to a study conducted by the school’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces “following damage to one of the windows” in the building’s dining hall.
Menafee said he was not involved with the student activism protesting the depiction of slaves on the windows, but that he nevertheless “put myself in a position to do it, and did it.”
“When I walked into this job, I wasn’t aware of none of that,” Menafee said of the social justice activism on campus. “And then you know, being there, you start hearing different things.”
Yale’s Vice President for Communications, Eileen O’Connor, told the Independent that glass had fallen on a woman but she was not injured. He added Menafee had apologized for what he had done and “subsequently resigned” from his job:
An incident occurred at Calhoun College, a residential college on the campus of Yale University, in which a stained glass window was broken by an employee of Yale, resulting in glass falling onto the street and onto a passerby, endangering [her] safety. The employee apologized for his actions and subsequently resigned from the University. The University will not advocate that the employee be prosecuted in connection with this incident and is not seeking restitution.
Both O’Connor and Menafee seemed to respond vaguely to the Independent’s questioning of the circumstances of Menafee’s resignation, and what kind of charges the university would press.
Menafee’s coworkers at the Yale cafeteria, along with students at Yale, commended his vandalism of the stained glass windows. Several members of the Yale community have even set up donation funds to help support him, as well as a petition to erase the charges against him, dubbing him an “anti-racist hero.”
“Everybody has something to say about them,” one worker said. “[Menafee] was the one who took action and busted that shit out.”
Menafee was arrested by the New Haven Police Department and faces a second-degree misdemeanor charge, as well as a first-degree felony charge of criminal mischief. He was escorted out of the university in handcuffs.
“I just went to the bathroom and shaved to make sure I was clean-shaven for the authorities,” Menafee said, adding that he regretted breaking the windows because he lost a job he loved.
“It could be termed as civil disobedience,” he said. “But there’s always better ways of doing things like that than just destroying things. It wasn’t my property, and I had no right to do it.”
Menafee has been washing dishes at the school’s dining hall since September 2007 and graduated from Virginia University with a mass communications degree in 2001. He has two children.
Follow Pardes Seleh on Twitter.