Corey Menafee can keep his job as a dishwasher at Yale University after he destroyed a “racist” stain glass window last month.
Menafee, 38, told reporters he was offended by the “racist” stain glass window depicting slaves toiling away in a cotton field.
On June 13, Menafee took a broomstick and smashed out the window, sending shards of glass raining down on the street, nearly hitting a pedestrian.
Menafee, who is black, immediately tendered his resignation and apologized to the university for destroying the window.
“An image was brought to my attention and I destroyed that image. I probably shouldn’t have, but I did,” said the former dining hall worker. “It was a disturbing image of what appeared to be two slaves — a male and a female — carrying baskets to a cotton field.”
He said the stained glass was “racist, and very degrading,” and he couldn’t stand looking at it any longer.
The window art was on display inside Yale’s Calhoun College residential hall, named for former Vice President John C. Calhoun, a member of the Democratic party that fought Republican efforts to end slavery.
Menafee smashed the window 2 months after Yale refused to remove Calhoun’s name from the college.
Menafee appeared in court on Tuesday to face a felony charge of criminal mischief and misdemeanor reckless endangerment.
His lawyer said Yale officials asked the state’s attorney not to pursue criminal charges. “Yale is also not seeking restitution.”
Supporters stood with Menafee outside the courtroom and online.
“Yale should pay his legal fees to compensate for the emotional distress their images evoke,” Austin Strayhorn, a sophomore at Yale, told the Daily Beast leftwing blog.
Brea Baker, a 2016 Yale graduate and former president of the university’s NAACP chapter, told the Beast in an email:
“First and foremost, Yale must apologize to Corey Menafee and black workers who come in daily and are subject to such a hostile work environment,” she wrote. “What he did was a form of decolonizing Yale and his bravery must be commended.”
Yale officials claimed they already had plans to remove that particular window.
An artist has been commissioned to replace the stain glass window.
Did I mention the Democratic party’s long history of oppressing black people? Or how the Democratic party fought tooth and nail the Republicans efforts to abolish slavery? Or how the Democrats paid off black leaders to recruit black people to their party after black people earned the right to vote?
Google it.
