Destroying Art Depicting Slavery Shatters Everyone's Shared Past

Corey Menafee, a Yale University employee, took a broomstick and smashed a stained-glass window depicting two slaves because, he said, he wanted to commit “civil disobedience” against the legacy of slavery.

But in destroying art, ironically, all he did was make it harder for people to learn about the evils of slavery.

Menafee, 38, was cleaning Calhoun College in June when he came across the window showing two slaves, a man and a woman, carrying cotton over their heads. “It’s 2016,” he told the New Haven Independent. “I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that. I just said, that thing’s coming down today.”

Police arrested Menafee on one misdemeanor and one felony charge (for endangering people walking below). He also lost his job.

But after Yale Law School students castigated the university for “call[ing] police on a black man for shattering an image that celebrates black bondage,” Yale said it won’t press charges.

The university also said it would take down the surviving windows and replace them with tinted glass while it hires someone to design new windows. Yale might display the old windows in a “contextual exhibition,” but not publicly.

What no one has talked about in the brouhaha is the windows themselves — which already have a context, and it almost certainly isn’t celebrating slavery.

There’s no evidence that the artist who designed the windows was a slave sympathizer. He wasn’t even born when America ended slavery; he was born six years later. And he wasn’t even born in America. Nicola D’Ascenzo was an Italian immigrant who emigrated to Philadelphia. He studied stained glass in New York and in Europe.

D’Ascenzo became famous (in stained-glass window circles) for his Art Nouveau designs. His windows, which he created in the early 20th century, adorn the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the Washington National Cathedral.

D’Ascenzo looked to medieval church art as well as to Louis Comfort Tiffany as his forebears, writes Lisa Weilbacker, who studied him for a master’s thesis. And he was adamant that everyone should learn about art, speaking often to public school groups.

He “was committed to educating America’s youth and the general public on stained glass and the importance of quality craftsmanship and its survival in the United States,” she wrote. He saw his art “as an expression of the present age for posterity, to keep burning for all time.”

Indeed, his Yale windows don’t so much celebrate slavery as they chronicle it. The slaves in the window that Menafee smashed don’t look happy, any more than Cain and Abel look happy in the Gothic stained-glass windows in the 800-year-old St. Chapelle chapel in Paris.

Not all art depicts happy, comfortable subjects. Around the time D’Ascenzo was working, in the early ’30s, the painter Thomas Hart Benton was doing his “America Today” mural, now in the Met. It shows black cotton pickers in the 1920s Deep South.

Is it offensive for mostly white (and now Asian) museum-goers to stare at depictions of black men toiling in a Southern field?

It would be more offensive to be forgotten.

J.M.W. Turner’s whaling paintings are, well, mean to whales — they show men attacking these creatures with knives and clubs. They, too, are on view at the Met.

Countless paintings show rape and murder.

And the 9/11 museum is putting on an exhibit that will feature Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman” sculpture — which is exactly what it sounds like. Making art of the 9/11 attacks is no different from making art of World War I battlefields, which artists like Marsden Hartley did.

Menafee might argue that people choose to go to museums. He had no choice but to look at the stained-glass window every day.

But most people don’t go to museums that often, or sit around reading Shakespeare.

How many white Yale students have looked at the slavery windows over the years and had their minds wander to the past? Will they think about much of anything looking at pretty-colored abstract glass instead?

When Yale locks its windows away in a “contextual” exhibit, the only people who will see them — and think about slavery — are the people who already knew enough to go to the exhibit.

Menafee was free to voice frustration about the windows, and to make an argument that slavery’s legacy still persists, in the fact that so many low-wage workers are black.

But he wasn’t free to destroy art — and destroy a little piece of everyone’s shared past.

This piece originally appeared at the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post