Are
We Going To Be Seeing More Cases Like This?
Each morning we rise
to find another ugly headline, or another news report complete with video about
a demonstration, a shooting, a death…. For so long we’ve kept silent about the symbols
we see around us (i.e. the Confederate flag, the stained glass panels) that are
humiliating and degrading to the history of black people, but now when we are
fed up and can’t be silent any more, suddenly we are not black men and women
who are trying to make a way for themselves, we are suddenly ‘hate-filled’, ‘violent
thugs’ who are trying to ‘divide this country’.
Mr. Menafee committed
a crime, but why did he do it? Perhaps
he got tired of coming to work every day and seeing depictions of black slaves
carrying baskets full of cotton for the ‘massa’. Some will say he should have just
quit, and you’re right, but have you never suddenly become completely fed up
with something which for years you had just shrugged off? I’m sure that everything
that has been going on in this country in recent times helped to make the
already bad feelings he worse. Not that that’s an excuse, nothing can excuse
what he did, but what I’m wondering if we’re going to see more and more of this
type of act, as more people become fed up and act out….
Black Yale Employee
Arrested, Loses Job After Smashing Stained Glass Panel Depicting Slaves
Carrying Cotton
Corey Menafee, who works as a dishwasher, said
that he was tired of looking at the “racist, very degrading” image depicted in
a panel in Yale's Calhoun residential college dining hall.
An employee at
Yale University is out of a job and now has an arrest record after smashing a
stained glass panel in the university’s Calhoun residential college dining hall
that depicted slaves carrying cotton, the New Haven Independent reports.
 |
| Panel of slaves carrying cotton |
Corey Menafee said
that he was tired of looking at the “racist, very degrading” panel and decided
to take a broomstick and knock the panel to the floor.
Menafee, 38, was
arrested and now faces a felony charge.
According to the
Independent, Menafee’s actions are the latest element in a debate over the
display of racially charged symbols around the undergraduate housing structure,
which was named after slavery advocate and former U.S. Vice President John
Calhoun.
Last summer, there was
a petition demanding a change in the name of the residential college. The
petition has since grown to include all the slavery-themed paintings, artifacts
and stained glass tiles around Calhoun College.
“When I walked into
this job, I wasn’t aware of none of that,” Menafee said. “And then you know,
being there, you start hearing different things.
“I took a broomstick,
and it was kind of high, and I climbed up and reached up and broke it,” he
said. “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.”
Menafee faces a
second-degree misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment and a first-degree
felony charge of criminal mischief. He said he regretted his actions, which
cost him a job that he loved.
“It could be termed as
civil disobedience,” Menafee 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.”
Below is one of the stained glass windows that
students have had to see every day. It was altered because originally one of its
panels depicted a shackled, kneeling slave at his side.
 |
| John C. Calhoun |
For
more information about Yale’s ties to slavery and to John C. Calhoun, a
slaveholder after which one of its colleges is named, click here.
Originally posted in The Root
by Breanna Edwards
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