Zach
Schwartz-Weinstein
ZACHSW@GMAIL.COM
In
November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University
named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall
manager who'd harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she'd
worked in the university's dining halls.
Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As a new hire, she
had not yet completed the 90-day probationary period that would qualify her for
membership in Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees, Hotel and
Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union and thus secure her
access to the union's then-flimsy grievance procedure. Williams’ act happened to occur during a
semester in which several members of Yale Students for a Democratic society had
taken jobs in the dining halls, inspired by a broader current of
“industrializing” – taking working-class jobs in order to organize mass
workplace resistance – across the New Left.
Yale SDS in particular was part of the somewhat notorious Progressive
Labor faction, which continued to claim the organization’s name following the
split at the 1969 national convention (which led to the creation of the Weather
Underground.) The presence of these
student radicals in the dining halls made workplace struggles that students
might otherwise have ignored objects of widespread concern and political
urgency. Following Williams’ firing, a
hundred students, members of Yale Students for a Democratic Society as well as
the Black Student Alliance at Yale, marched into the university's human
resources office in the basement of Wright Hall to demand the university
reinstate her. The students occupied the
office and took several administrators hostage for a few hours. With the conclusion of the occupation, 47
students were immediately suspended, though all were eventually
reinstated. (One alumnus, who’d taken a
job as a university custodial worker, was eventually fired for his role in the
occupation.) The occupation was successful - Williams won her job back – or
rather, Yale administrators discovered, they claimed, that they had never
actually fired her. But, a month after
returning to work, Williams had quit. Subjected to continued harassment from
white supervisors due to her newfound notoriety, Williams explained that
working at Yale was "agony."
Williams'
action, and the actions of her supporters, directly implicated the racist and
sexist conditions of service work at Yale in the late 1960s. Over the last few weeks, a contemporary
parallel has emerged in Corey Menafee's decision to destroy with the butt of
his broomstick a stained glass pane depicting two enslaved people of African
descent picking cotton in the dining hall of Yale's Calhoun College, where Menafee
worked as a General Service Assistant. Although Menafee broke the window this past June,
his action has only become public knowledge in the past week and a half thanks
to reporting by the New Haven Independent.
Like Colia Williams' defiant glass-throwing, Corey Menafee's
window-breaking evokes a long, submerged history of property destruction and
direct action by Yale employees. Much of
this activity occurred throughout the long, hard decade of labor struggles
between the calamitous defeat of the workers in a truncated 1968 strike, when
student scab labor blunted the strike's impact and a weak settlement prompted
rank and file rebellion at the contract ratification vote and subsequent
threats of wildcat strikes, and the 13-week long walkout in 1977, still the
longest at a university with a history of long strikes. During the 1971 strike workers slashed the
wiring and tires of university vehicles.
They and their supporters among a now-radicalized student left also
flooded dining halls and blockaded the university' power plants to stop oil
deliveries. (In a speech on campus
during one of two strikes in 2003, then-presidential candidate Howard Dean
recalled his participation in the blockade.)
In 1977, when a belligerent, right-wing anti-union white student
provocateur tried to shove his way through a picket line of striking black
blue-collar workers, a striker punched him in the face. The student required 23 stitches. (Even senior university administrators agreed
that the student was “out to antagoniz[e] or incite violence.” During the same strike, an unknown party
firebombed a university safety office adjacent to one of the power plants,
throwing a pair of burning whiskey bottles through a window. Though those
responsible for the firebombing were never found, the incident was reported as
if it were related to the strike, an act of sabotage by rogue workers or their
supporters.
Most
of these actions were directly related to labor struggles, perhaps more so than
they directly referenced the university's long history of profiting from and
glorifying slavery and the trade in enslaved Africans and their
descendents. Yet these were hardly ever
discreet, separate phenomena. Yale’s
labor struggles and battles over its legacy of slavery and genocide have often
intersected. It was three graduate
student union activists, Antony Dugdale, J.J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro
Alves, who wrote the 2001 report “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” tracing the
university’s connections to slavery in the midst of its hagiographic
tercentennial celebration. There's often been an explicitly Antiracist
character to labor struggles at Yale, as true of when the vast majority of the
university' black workforce refused to work on the day following the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university had made work optional
in the hopes of avoiding disruptions) as when thousands of striking workers and
members of the New Haven community demanded equitable hiring of Latino workers
during a weeklong strike in March 2003, or when the graduate employee union
waged a campaign against the university’s investments in the Corrections
Corporation of America which culminated with the university’s hedge fund,
Farallon Capital Management LLC, divesting from CCA when Yale’s Advisory
Committee on Investor Responsibility refused to do so.
Make
no mistake; Yale’s involvement with slavery far exceeds its continued honoring
of John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery ideologue, senator, and statesman. As Dugdale, Feuser, and Castro Alves noted,
the labor of the slaves who worked George Berkeley’s Rhode Island plantation
provided the capital for Yale’s first scholarships. The slave-trader Phillip Livingston financed
the university’s first endowed professorship.
(Yale, in turn, trained Livingston’s children in the management of his
transoceanic enterprise.) The profits
from slave labor funded the university’s library and laid the groundwork for its
endowment, which now exceeds $25 billion.
Besides its close ties to slave-trade merchant capitalists, and the West
Indies plantocrats in particular, Yale was itself a site of slave labor. “Slaveholding,” notes the historian Craig
Steven Wilder in Ebony and Ivy, his
2013 history of US universities’ relationships with colonial genocide and
racial slavery, “was common among Yale’s early faculty and governors.” 
But
if Yale’s legacy of slavery stretched back to its earliest days, the slave
pastoral stained glass window Menafee broke is of a much more recent
vintage. Like the residential college in
which it was until recently installed, it was constructed slightly more than
eighty years ago, in the early 1930s.
Not only has Yale been slow to reckon with its past; well into the
twentieth century, it was actively affirming the central role slave capitalism
played in its origins and development.
Until 2007 the room where The Yale Corporation (the university’s board
of trustees) meets prominently featured a painting of Elihu Yale, the
notoriously abusive official of the East India Company whose name the
university has borne since 1718 and who may have himself profited from the sale
of slaves. The painting depicts Yale
with a dark-skinned child at his feet.
Around the child’s neck, an iron collar is clearly visible.
Yale
University has mostly avoided substantive discussion of its history, choosing
instead to emphasize conversions to abolitionism or early African-American
graduates. But one is constantly
reminded. In some ways, conditions for
dining hall workers are very different now than they were when Williams worked
at Yale. The three long strikes of the
1970s, the ten-week long strike in 1984, the two strikes in 1996, and the
landmark settlement of the second strike of 2003 increased pay substantially,
slowed the administration’s attempt to undermine the union by subcontracting
and casualizing the labor force, ended the practice of routinely laying off hundreds
of workers each summer, and won unparalleled job security language which
prevents layoffs during the duration of the contract cycle. But, in other respects, things haven’t
changed that much. Many food service and
custodial workers still work 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat. Several stories about Menafee include the
detail that he can’t afford a cellular phone.
Yale remains an institution soaked in and celebratory of a long history
of white supremacy. It is impossible to
walk through, or by, the university’s many service entrances and not understand
this, to not sense how interlinked white supremacy is with the everyday
experience of work and/or study. Indeed,
Menafee's action might itself serve as a reminder of the continuities between
racialized service work and slavery, at a university that slavery funded, a
university where slaves labored, in a city profoundly shaped by the history of
slavery and abolition as by the confluence of deindustrialization and capital
flight, university tax exemption, real-estate speculation, and expansion, and a
mode of racial capitalism which conjoined them through the labor of a
predominantly African American workforce of food service and custodial workers
whose history of struggle produced Yale's unprecedented history of strikes - as
many as twenty between the early 1940s and 2005, depending on what and how one
goes about counting.
Corey
Menafee's act of refusal, the refusal to continue working under the symbols of
Yale's history of chattel slavery and colonial genocide, punctures the
hypocrisy which has suffused so much of Yale's recent hand-wringing over its
white supremacist past and present, a hypocrisy which led it to try to fold Menafee's
broken window into an ongoing "art survey" launched in response to
student discontent over the decision to keep John C. Calhoun's name on one of
its residential colleges. Perhaps it
also kept the matter quiet to discourage other such acts against other symbols
of Yale’s racism and imperialism, of which many remain. The tinted glass which quickly replaced the
smashed panel could just as easily be read as a small form of
counterinsurgency, rendering the university’s interior once more opaque to the
New Haveners whose congress along Elm Street, the major thoroughfare adjacent
to Calhoun College, has been so heavily monitored by the university’s police
department, and projecting a pristine, undamaged facade to the world.
Menafee's
act further makes transparent three fallacies: that recent campus protest over
cultures of racism and white supremacy on US campuses speak more to the coddled
nature of millienial students than the actual political economy of US racial
capitalism, that the continued presence of such celebrations of the
university’s racism is permitted only for educational purposes, and, above all,
that service workers are not themselves implicated by and participants in those
debates and struggles. Maybe nowhere more
than in their role as employers of racialized service work do US universities
suture old and new forms of white supremacist racial capitalism. Through studying the history of that labor
and those who have performed it, we can gain better insight into how
universities have continued to occupy slavery's afterlives. Standing in solidarity with Corey Menafee and
with those who have come before him requires both an unflinching and rigorous
critique of this relationship between university service labor and the American
college's debt to the enslavement of and trade in people of African descent,
and a collective commitment towards its overturning.
