Yale Dishwasher Resigns After Smashing 'Racist' Stained-Glass Window

A black Yale University dishwasher has resigned after he smashed a stained-glass window that depicted slaves picking cotton.

Corey Menafee, 38, told the New Haven Independent that he used a broomstick last month to break the windowpane in a residential dining hall, saying it showed a "racist, very degrading" scene.

"It's 2016; I shouldn't have to come to work and see things like that," he told the newspaper.

"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."

The windowpane was displayed in a dining hall at Calhoun College, which has been at the center of a campus debate about race.

Menafee is facing a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment and a felony charge of criminal mischief, according to the Independent. He was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.

He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Menafee told the Independent that he was helping to clean the dining hall June 13 when he looked at the windowpane and got the idea to break it.

"Everybody has something to say about them," an unnamed employee told the newspaper, adding that Menafee was "the one who took action."

"I didn't commit any acts of violence against anyone or any living thing," Menafee told the newspaper.

Eileen O'Connor, Yale's vice president for communications, told the Independent in a statement that the glass fell to the street and onto a passerby but that the woman was not injured.

"The employee apologized for his actions and subsequently resigned from the university," O'Connor said in her statement. "The university will not advocate that the employee be prosecuted in connection with this incident and is not seeking restitution."

A Yale spokeswoman told The Washington Post that she thought the New Haven Police Department handled the case, but the department's public information officer told The Post that he had no record of an arrest. The New Haven courthouse confirmed that it appeared Yale was the arresting agency.

Yale police could not immediately be reached for comment.

The June 13 incident came after a months-long debate over the name of Calhoun College. It is named after John C. Calhoun, a Yale College alumnus who served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and was known for his impassioned defense of the slave-plantation system in the South.

Many in the Yale community have called for a name change. "Calhoun College represents an indifference to centuries of pain and suffering among the black population," according to a petition from students and alumni. "It conveys disrespect toward black perspectives, and serves a barrier toward racial inclusiveness. Calhoun College will always preclude minority students from feeling truly at home at Yale."

In April, however, the university announced that it would keep the Calhoun College name.

However, the Yale Daily News reported last week that Calhoun College told students in an email that it was making some changes, including removing a set of stained-glass windows portraying Calhoun from a common room and renaming the dining hall after another Yale alumnus, Roosevelt Thompson.

Julia Adams, head of Calhoun College, told the students that "the damage to one of the windows" had promoted a review by Yale's Committee on Art in Public Spaces, according to the Yale Daily News.

"My goal is to have things ready for Hounies' return to campus," Adams told the student newspaper. "Placating people wasn't in my mind. Rather I hope that the specific mingling of old and new, in which the students and broader Calhoun community will have a hand, opens to the future as well as the past."

Menafee, the former dishwasher, holds a degree in mass communications from Virginia Union University, a historically black college in Richmond, according to the Independent.

Virginia Union's website says the school "was founded in 1865 to give newly emancipated slaves an opportunity for education and advancement." The school says on its site that it "is nourished by its African American heritage and energized by a commitment to excellence and diversity."

In 2007, Menafee went to work at Yale, according to the newspaper.

His recent resignation prompted plans for a demonstration Tuesday at the New Haven Courthouse.

"Yale: Put Corey Menafee back to work. Give him a hearing. Listen to him. Change the oppressive environment in which he works. Change the name of Calhoun College," John Jairo Lugo of the social justice group Unidad Latina en Accion said in a statement, according to the Independent.

"What is more valuable to Yale: a stained glassed window of enslaved people picking cotton, or the humanity of the African American people who work at Yale?"

Still, Menafee told the newspaper that he now regrets what he did.

"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."

(c) 2016, The Washington Post