Michelle Liu Photos
Months after he smashed a slavery-themed window in Yale’s Calhoun College with a broom, cafeteria worker Corey Menafee stepped away from his job during a 30-minute break on Friday to return the favor for those who helped him regain that job this summer.
In a two-hour rally that afternoon, over 150 Yale students, faculty, staff and New Haven community members joined together on the New Haven Green near College and Elm Streets, opposite Calhoun College, to demand that Yale change the name of the residential college, christened in 1933 for ardent slavery proponent and former U.S. vice-president John C. Calhoun.
The crowd, organized by the newly established town-gown Change the Name Coalition, marched around Yale’s Old Campus before arriving at the front of University President Peter Salovey’s office. There, a series of local activists spoke up against what they perceived as the deep injustice of institutional racism embodied by the name of the college. They were waiting on a speech from Menafee, who was walking over from Stiles College near Broadway, before delivering a letter to Salovey calling on the president to take action.
The letter pointed to Menafee as the catalyst for community activism to rename the college. The last line reads: “No process, no matter how well meaning, should be allowed to delay the inevitable. The time for change has come, and this community intends to fight until that happens.” (Read the whole letter here.)
Menafee, whose destruction of the window originally led to his forced resignation, kept his time in the spotlight brief: a few lines, hardly a minute.
“Thank you all for coming out today to demonstrate discontent with John Calhoun College,” he said. “We are here because we no longer want the name Calhoun casting a shadow on our university, the university we all come to know and love. And we are here because we want the powers that be to hear us loudly and clearly that the time for change is now. Not next semester, not the year after, but now. Thank you very much, and God bless all of you.”
A Public Figure
Earlier this month, Menafee signed a petition calling for a position for Yale’s blue-collar workers on the University’s Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, which was itself established Aug. 1 amid the national attention drawn to the window incident. (Activists soured on the committee at Friday’s march and rally, pointing to the ambiguous language that describes the committee’s purpose: “to articulate a set of principles that can guide Yale in decisions about whether to remove a historical name from a building or other prominent structure or space on campus — principles that are enduring rather than specific to particular controversies.”)
Menafee told the Independent on his way back to Stiles — where he was placed after community and media pressure led Yale to both drop a felony charge against him and reinstate him — that he didn’t regret his actions in breaking the window. He doubts he would have been able to effect change any other way.
“Now I’m a public figure,” Menafee said. “You can’t just think about your own wants and needs, you have to think about the public. The public who were there for me when I was unemployed. It’s right that you reciprocate that love and support and show your appreciation.”
“He’s the connector between campus and the city,” his lawyer, Patricia Kane, said.
A Town-Gown Effort
A series of chants could be heard throughout the afternoon: “Take down those racist windowpanes, change the name”; “hey hey, ho ho, Calhoun College has got to go.”
Edgar Sandoval of Unidad Latina en Accion carried around a broom Friday, as a reminder of Menafee’s actions in breaking the window in Calhoun College.
Charles Musser (pictured), a professor of American studies at Yale, noted that the university’s faculty senate had voted 19 to 1 to change the name. He himself suggested “Amistad,” after the famous slave ship on which a mutiny took place.
“For a lot of us, I think, something very important happened this summer when Corey Menafee did his courageous act,” Musser said. “What he made clear was this is not just about the name of Calhoun College. It’s about getting rid of a shrine, a monument to white supremacy.”
Another Yale employee — Vanesa Suarez, who works in Trumbull College’s dining hall — took the megaphone, pointing out her consciousness that she was “a part of the working class, a large body of people who are exploited on a regular basis because of the capitalist society we live in.”
“We demand reparations, and I hope Yale takes a change in the right direction against institutional racism,” Suarez added.
After the two demands by community activists — that the university reinstate Menafee and drop charges against him — were met, activists recognized that though Menafee’s needs had been resolved, a larger systemic problem was at hand, organizer Kica Matos of the Center for Community Change said.
And so, nearly 50 community and university organizations, from ULA and New Haven Rising to the Black Student Alliance at Yale and Fossil Free Yale, agreed to unify as a way of ramping up pressure on Yale to change the Calhoun name. That pressure followed months of weekly Friday protests ULA has held outside Calhoun College on Elm Street since the organization began advocating on Menafee’s behalf.
This broader coalition is prepared to escalate actions further, Matos told the Independent, up to and including acts of civil disobedience.
Ultimately, an attempt to hand-deliver the letter to Salovey failed: an assistant cracked the door open halfway, only to tell Matos that the president was in a meeting.
“How convenient!” someone in the crowd jeered.
Soon, the chants shifted: “We want Salovey”; “we’ll be back.”
PS is always meeting with someone, just not you. I knew he wouldn't show.
I like the "Amistad" idea very much. The ship is in port now