New Havener Of The Year

At first, Uncle Milton thought Corey Menafee was a ​“dumbass” for losing his steady Yale dining hall job by smashing a small stained-glass window depicting slaves picking cotton.

He had no idea Menafee was about to become a celebrity. Or that one unpremeditated action would reverse the decision of a $25 billion-endowed university and lead some of its leading minds to devise an intellectual framework to help campuses across the country tackle racial controversy.

Menafee had no idea, either. He figured he’d blown it.

Menafee smashed the window on June 13. He landed in police lock-up and lost his job.

Since then, the soft-spoken, contemplative 38-year-old New Haven native has traveled a surreal journey through his 15 minutes of fame and back again. As 2016 slid to its contentious conclusion, Menafee had happily returned to the humble life he was leading before he ever broke that window. No one was telling him he was Rosa Parks anymore. He had stowed away his new suit and stayed put in his apartment in the Hill, several blocks from where he spent part of his childhood in the Church Street South housing complex. This week he put away the dining-hall dishes with co-workers one last time as students left campus for winter break, then reflected on the wild year that didn’t change his life.

Well, Menafee’s life has changed in one respect: He has kept his new cell phone.

And he continues to marvel at how he had unwittingly hurled Yale and New Haven into a new round of wrestling with the ghosts of history. And how in any given year you can never predict which of the 130,000 people who call this university city home will end up setting events into unpredictable motion.

An Old Blue Stops By

Yale had already been wrestling with its racial legacy before June. Throughout the academic year student protestors had called for the university to change the name of a residential college named after former U.S. Vice-President John Calhoun, one of the country’s leading 19th-century advocates of slavery. Similar protests occurred on campuses across the country. In April, as the spring semester neared its end, Yale President Peter Salovey announced a decision: The Calhoun name would stay.

Menafee had been clearing dishes and sweeping floors in Calhoun’s dining hall since the previous December. It was the best assignment he had received in his 10 years working at Yale. The pace was slower than, say, at the shared Branford-Saybrook College dining hall, where he previously did the same job. Or at the Commons dining hall, where he washed a never-ending stream of pots. Calhoun was chill.

He knew some students wanted to change the Calhoun name. He didn’t give it much thought. He follows football more than the news. He never got involved in protests.

“To me,” he recalled, ​“it was their business. I was here to work.”

The students went home for the summer. Alumni swarmed in for reunion weekends. One Sunday Menafee reported to work to clean up after the final reunion events. Menafee finished his tasks a little before 11:30 a.m. He checked in with his manager, who agreed to let him to stay until noon so he could get credit for the full hour.

A Calhoun alum — African-American, like Menafee — entered the dining hall with his daughter as Menafee sat waiting to leave. The alum, who appeared to be in his 50s, asked Menafee if he’d followed the Calhoun name-change controversy.

“Even when I was back in college,” the alum said, ​“we were trying to change it.”

He called his daughter’s and Menafee’s attention to the small stained-glass windows along a wall facing Elm Street. Menafee had never paid attention to them before. Figured they were just pictures. The alum noted that the windows depicted slaves picking cotton in a field.

Menafee was startled.

“When I saw that, it hurt,” he recalled. ​“I never noticed it before. It just struck me — the combination of that, and him showing his daughter, generation to generation. Looking at that picture, I thought: That needs to come down.”

At noon, Menafee went home. He returned to work that week and didn’t think much more about the window. At least not consciously. It turned out, he realized later, that the alum’s visit had stayed with him.

The Yale Grail

Menafee once dreamed big. Growing up, he dreamed of becoming a professional football player. At Hillhouse High School, he made the team all four years. He was small for a lineman, and he barely saw any playing time.

When he enrolled as a freshman at Virginia Union University in Richmond, he decided not try out for the team. ​“I had a heart for the game,” he said. But, he realized, ​“I wasn’t skillful.”

He started out as a science major. Then his mother April, a nurse’s aide who had raised Menafee on her own, fell ill. Menafee moved back home to take care of her and his younger brother. He juggled courses at Southern, a part-time Radio Shack job, helping his mom, with a new romantic relationship. After three semesters, he was failing his courses. He returned to Richmond to concentrate again on his studies.

He switched his major from science to mass communications. He had his eye on a sportswriting career. He landed a spot as sports editor of the campus paper.

Returning home after graduation, he held onto the journalism dream for a while. He covered some West Haven City Council meetings as an intern for the weekly West Haven Voice. (His editor, Bill Riccio, this week remembered Menafee as someone who ​“wanted to learn.”)

He gradually abandoned that dream amid the grind of earning a living. He worked a back-office job at Knights of Columbus for a few years, tried commuting to a New York sales job, substitute-taught in New Haven schools.

In 2006, he landed a plum post for many New Haveners: working in a Yale dining hall. He started out as a part-time ​“general services assistant,” putting out and clearing dishes, sweeping and mopping floors. By 2008 he’d moved up to a full-time unionized post.

He settled into a rhythm. He had an apartment he liked on Liberty Street, with room for his two kids to stay with him when they weren’t with his mom. He didn’t want a car, didn’t want a phone, saw no need for a computer. He liked walking to and from the steady job he’d found at Yale. He intended to keep it.

“Clean-Shaven For The Authorities”

Menafee was keeping it just fine when, around 9 a.m. on June 13, nine days after that alum’s visit to Calhoun, he was helping prepare the dining hall for the summer school session and he happened to look up. He noticed that window.

“Something moved me,” he recalled. ​“The same thought came to my brain: That thing has to come down.”

He grabbed a broomstick. He walked up to the window panel depicting the slavery scene.

As he later related in a July Independent interview, he twice smacked the window with the broom. He then watched 27 shards of glass fall to the ground. (He did not recount these moments in an interview this week, because of a gag rule imposed by his employer.)

Menafee’s boss saw him do it. Yale cops were called.

“I just went to the bathroom and shaved,” Menafee said, ​“to make sure I was clean-shaven for the authorities.”

Two Yale patrol officers to arrive, one of them black, the other Latino. Menafee regretted breaking the window. He told them so. They said they would write him a court summons for a misdemeanor.

Then a sergeant, who happens to be white, showed up. He insisted that Menafee be handcuffed, taken to the police lock-up at 1 Union Ave., and charged with a first-degree felony charge of criminal mischief and a second-degree misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment.

By that time, Menafee’s union rep, Tyisha Walker (who also happens to preside over New Haven’s Board of Alders), had arrived as well. She convinced the cops to wait until Menafee was in the cruiser to handcuff him.

Menafee remained at the lock-up until evening, at which point he was released with a promise to appear in court. The union subsequently negotiated with Yale to have Menafee resign rather than get fired. In return, Yale would not object to his obtaining unemployment compensation or seek the $2,500 restitution for the window.

Menafee mistakenly thought the deal included Yale asking the state prosecutor to drop the charge. He would discover in court that the charges remained in place.

Now he was worried. He had no job. He faced possible jail time. With no one to help him.

“Free Corey!”

Or so he figured on the morning of July 12, when he put on a white T‑shirt, worn-out pants, and sneakers to walk to state Superior Court on Elm Street for his arraignment.

Because he had no computer or phone, he didn’t know that the afternoon and evening before, his story had gone viral.

Yale and the union had succeeded in keeping the incident quiet until then, when this Independent story reported Menafee’s case. Menafee had spoken with a reporter for the story. Without a computer or telephone, he didn’t known the story had been been published.

Within an hour of publication, links and summaries were appearing on websites throughout the world. Alumni from across the country were drafting petitions to get Menafee’s job back at Yale. They called his firing an overreaction by a university unwilling to confront its institutional racism. (Others, meanwhile, argued people shouldn’t celebrate the destruction of art.) Local activists planned a courthouse rally. Out-of-town reporters were contacting Yale for comment; Yale suggested it had agreed to ​“drop the charges” against Menafee, even though only a prosecutor could do that, and Yale hadn’t yet asked him to.

Menafee arrived courthouse early. Protesters, who had spent the previous day organizing, hadn’t yet arrived with their signs on the front steps.

He wandered into Courtroom A, the cavernous, drab arraignment room at the far end of the marble courthouse’s first floor. Court hadn’t started yet.

Menafee thought the room looked different from his previous there in this case.

The room ​“was packed full of people who aren’t the usual criminal-looking people. Young people. They didn’t look like thugs. They looked out of place. They looked like … the people sitting in here,” he recalled, gesturing to other patrons of Blue State Coffee on York Street, where he was being interviewed this week.

I wonder why they’re all here, Menafee remembered thinking to himself in Courtroom A.

He went looking for his public defender, who informed Menafee that he now had a private lawyer. He was directed to the public defender’s office at the other end of the first floor. There he met up with Patricia Kane, an attorney whom a local philanthropist named Wendy Hamilton had hired on Menafee’s behalf after reading his story.

“In my memory she was dressed all in white. She said, ​‘I read about you in the New Haven Independent. I would like to represent you pro bono.’ It was like a ray of sunshine. You could hear the angels: ​‘Aaaaahhh!’”

Back in the hall he encountered a half-dozen reporters wanting to speak to him. Menafee now realized why all those out-of-place people were packing Courtroom A.

An African-American couple approached him inside the courtroom. ​“I’m a dean,” the woman said. ​“I’m here to support you.”

The proceeding itself took only a few minutes. Menafee’s case was continued.

With Kane at his side, Menafee emerged back into the sunlight to wade into protesters being filmed by TV crews on the marble front steps. Reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other out-of-state news organizations had come to town, too. For him.

“Free Corey!” the protesters chanted. ​“Black Lives Matter!” one sign read. Declared another: ​“Corey Menafee New Haven Hero.” One protester compared him to Rosa Parks.

All Menafee could think was: I wish Uncle Milton were here. Though technically his uncle, Milton is only 15 months older than Menafee. They hang out all the time. And love to laugh.

Menafee thought Milton would especially enjoy hearing what a protester told a reporter asked Menafee if he wanted his Yale job back.

“Hell no!” she responded before Menafee could talk. ​“He doesn’t want his job back” at a ​“racist institution!”

Actually, Menafee said, ​“I would love to have my job back.”

Democracy, Now

The following weeks were a whirlwind. Menafee was now a symbol for the red-hot Black Lives Matter movement as well as for campus racial protests.

Kane took him to Ferrucci Ltd. at Orange and Elm streets to buy a suit and shoes and socks, with $500 Wendy Hamilton lent him.

“You need a phone,” Kane told Menafee.

At first he balked. ​“I’m not a phone person,” he said. ​“I don’t like being bothered.” But he relented.

The pair went on the set of the the televised program Democracy Now! show to tell Menafee’s story. (Watch the segment above.) Menafee continued to insist that he didn’t feel proud to have broken the window. He doesn’t believe in destroying property to make a point. But he also believed that Yale should remove those windows from the dining hall — which Yale had by then formed a committee to do, with a plan to preserve the art and present it in its historical context in a collection. A fuller public discussion ensued about the art on display at Calhoun. It wasn’t just one window.

The Old Blue petition drives and outraged online discussions mounted. New Haven’s mayor joined a growing call for Menafee’s rehiring. Yale President Salovey announced Yale had now asked the prosecutor to drop the charges against Menafee. (The charges were nolled.) ​“Regrettable for all concerned,” Salovey said of the incident. He also agreed to reopen the question of whether to rename Calhoun College.

Yale and the union negotiated a deal: Menafee could return to campus on the terms that he serve a five-week suspension. The university and the union (!) also agreed to a gag provision that would prevent Menafee from speaking out more in public about the incident (which is why he didn’t describe breaking the window for the interview for this article). That provision outraged Kane, who advised against it.

But Menafee wanted his job back. So he signed. He was relieved.

And he noticed that Uncle Milton and his other relatives and friends had stopped razzing him.

“When I first lost my job, they were all cussing me out. ​‘You’re stupid! You threw away the best job you could have!’

“Then everybody flipped. ​‘You made national news!’ Two weeks ago, I was the biggest dumbass in the family.”

Back Home

When students returned for the fall semester, Menafee was back putting out plates and sweeping floors, this time in the Ezra Stiles residential college cafeteria. It was busier than Calhoun. He didn’t mind.

Students and professors shook his hand. They told him they admire him. But life pretty much returned to normal. Menafee was no longer a center of attention. He liked it that way.

Elsewhere on campus, a Salovey-appointed committee of historians and other scholars drew up a report about how Yale — and by extension other colleges — should decide whether or not to rename buildings honoring people with objectionable histories. The committee included advocates and opponents of renaming Calhoun. They thought hard about the question, and produced a thorough and enlightening report. It traced the question’s history and nuances, little-known instances of renamings at other campuses. And it suggested guidelines for when and how to rename buildings, and when not to.

Look for decision-makers at other controversy-torn campuses to use the report as a guide. Salovey has now appointed another committee to advise him soon on whether to rename Calhoun based on the report’s arguments.

Meanwhile, one day back at Stiles, a coworker at the dining hall front desk called Menafee over. A man had left an envelope for him. Menafee opened it to find an invitation to a ceremony back in Calhoun’s dining hall. He decided to accept the invitation.

It was for a name-changing ceremony: Calhoun was renaming its dining hall after Roosevelt Thompson, a promising African-American in the undergraduate Class of 1984 who had died in a car accident. Menafee loved meeting Thompson’s family. He was proud of the name change.

A white professor walked up to him at the ceremony. With tears in his eyes, the professor told Menafee how he, too, had long objected to that window. But ​“I wasn’t going to risk my job for it,” he told Menafee. ​“You had the guts to do it.”

Kica Matos, a New Haven activist who championed Menafee’s cause, described him this week as ​“a reluctant hero. In one simple act driven by his conscience and sense of dignity, he destroyed a deeply racist image at Yale and in doing so, crystallized what the Calhoun issue is all about: respect for the dignity and rights of African Americans and the need to stop glorifying slavery and move the needle in the right direction when it comes to issues of race and justice. It was Corey’s act that brought town and gown together, fighting to right the wrong that was his arrest, prosecution and firing. It was Corey’s intelligence and eloquence that signaled to the world just how horrible it is that still today, Yale continues to celebrate a champion of slavery. Corey’s quiet demeanor and lack of ego uniquely inspired students and community members who believe in a world that can be free from the vestiges of slavery and racism.”

“I understand why people feel I’m a hero,” Menafee reflected in this week’s interview. ​“Me? No. I don’t see myself as a hero. I simply got tired of looking at a degrading image.”

Given how it all turned out, Menafee said, he doesn’t regret his action. But he wouldn’t do it again. ​“It’s not the way you should go about acting out. If you don’t agree with something, you should have a sit-down with the parties that be. You should use your intellect.”

It was suggested to him that lots of people had done that. Nothing changed until he broke the window.

“It makes me feel my efforts were not in vain,” he responding, ​“but you don’t want to go destroying something to bring about change. I’m not a lunatic. I’m not going to go around destroying things to bring about change.

“I didn’t change the world. I gave momentum to an issue that was at a standstill.

“The only way I can make out any logic of this: God works in mysterious ways. This was an act of God. He just used me this time.”

And now, he said, that chapter is over. He is happy to be back on the job in the dining hall, he said; his only dream now, he insisted, is to last two more decades at Yale and retire with a ​“nice pension.” He resisted Kane’s suggestion that he move to a nicer home after supporters this summer raised $28,000 on his behalf. Instead, he paid back Hamilton, took care of some debts, and put the rest in a 401(k) plan, he said.

He liked the way he was living. He saw no need to change. ​“I like my apartment. It’s my place. I’m good with it. When people acquire more money than they’re used to having, they sometimes lose their mind. I’m grounded. The Bible says to stay humble. ​‘Don’t cherish earthly things.’ At the end of the day, they’re nothing. I believe in that.”

While a crazy 2016 is now behind him, the Calhoun incident isn’t, completely. A playwright recently contacted him. She would like to write a play about the episode. He has begun sitting for interviews with her. It’s not every day, Menafee noted, that somebody wants to write your life story.

Previous New Haveners of the Year:
• 2015: Jim Turcio.
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur