A Yale cafeteria worker has resigned after smashing a historic stained glass window in Yale’s notorious Calhoun College residence hall, which is named after the 19th century white supremacist John C. Calhoun. The stained glass depicted two slaves picking cotton.
The worker, Corey Menafee, is black. He told the New Haven Independent that the dining hall window was “racist” and “very degrading” and that last month, while working an event for the college, he decided to use a broomstick to smash the window.
“I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high, and I climbed up and reached up and broke it,” he told the Independent. “It’s 2016, I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that.
“I just said, ‘That thing’s coming down today. I’m tired of it,’” he added. “I put myself in a position to do it, and did it.”
City police arrested Menafee, who now faces a felony charge.
The stained glass window is one of many at Yale deemed offensive by modern standards. For many years, it was concealed by plexiglass and didn’t become widely visible until after a recent renovation. Another stained glass depiction of John C Calhoun with a slave kneeling before him was altered in the early 1990s (to remove the slave). Yet another offensive stained glass image, of a black person eating watermelon, was removed from Yale’s main library in the mid 1990s.
As for Calhoun College itself, the long-running controversy over its name finally came to the fore just this year when Yale officials, after much hand-wringing, announced that they would not strip the former vice president’s name from the college. The move appeared to be a concession to Yale’s powerful alumni. Yale’s concessions to the social justice warriors? Ending the practice of referring to the heads of residential colleges as “masters” (they will now be called “head of college”) and naming one of two new residential colleges after Pauli Murray, a black lesbian civil rights leader.
Menafee (pictured ab0ve), the worker who broke the window, says he regrets what he did because it cost him his job, but says he believes his actions were justified. “It could be termed as civil disobedience,” Menafee told the New Haven Independent. “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.”
Yale says the breaking of the glass presented a safety issue — that some glass fell onto a sidewalk and hit a passing woman, who was not injured. Yale also says it will not advocate for the criminal charges to be pursued against Menafee.
