Students walk on the Yale campus in 2015.
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An African-American dishwasher at Yale University has lost his job after breaking what he described as a “racist, very degrading” stained-glass window panel at one of the university’s dining halls, the New Haven Independent reports. 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”.
“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, adding that he was exhausted of looking at the “racist, very degrading” image.
“The employee apologized for his actions and subsequently resigned from the University”, Conroy said.
The university went on to say that the New Haven Police Department has taken over the case and it’s now up to law enforcement whether or not charges will follow.
University officials announced last week that some panes depicting scenes from Calhoun’s life would be taken down.
The residential college where he worked is named after John C. Calhoun, slaveholder, slavery advocate and former USA vice president.
Menafee was charged with second-degree reckless endangerment and first-degree criminal mischief, the latter being a felony.
The college will not push for prosecution or seek restitution for the glass, a spokesperson said. The university in April announced that the college’s name would be preserved despite a year-long protest by students and faculty to change it and to remove the slavery-themed paintings and stained-glass panes scattered throughout the college.
A tribute to one of America’s greatest injustices received a farewell when a black dishwasher used a broomstick to send a stain-glass panel depicting slaves carrying cotton crashing to the floor. ‘But there’s always better ways of doing things like that than just destroying things. He was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.
‘I just said, ‘That thing’s coming down today.
Adams told the Yale Daily News: ‘Placating people wasn’t in my mind.
Yale says breaking of the glass presented a safety issue – that it glass fell onto a sidewalk and hit a passing woman, who was not injured.
“It could be termed as civil disobedience”, Menafee told the Independent.
‘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’. “It wasn’t my property, and I had no right to do it”, he said.
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Yale president Peter Salovey defended the decision and was reported by the NYTimes saying: ‘Universities have to be the places where tough conversations happen. Yale’s concessions to the social justice warriors?
