Carnage Middle celebrates 50th anniversary, and so does school’s custodian

Every day at 6 a.m., Joseph Gordon walks the darkened halls of Fred J. Carnage Middle School, as he has for 50 years, unlocking doors and turning on lights before students arrive.

Gordon, 75, began working as a custodian in Raleigh schools when he was 16. In 1965, he was named head custodian at Carnage, a new segregated junior high in Southeast Raleigh that served black students in grades seven through nine.

This school year, Carnage is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The school’s role over the years reads like a page out of a local history book: The black school, named for a civil rights leader, was slowly integrated and grew to become a popular magnet school with a gifted-and-talented theme that draws students from much of Wake County.

Gordon has been around to see it all from the beginning.

One of 10 children born to African-American sharecroppers in Johnston County, Gordon went to live with his older sister in Southeast Raleigh after his parents died. He was 15.

Gordon finished ninth grade at Washington Junior High and took a job at 16 as a custodian at the school to help support his two younger brothers.

He worked at other Raleigh schools before he was sent to Carnage, where he remained until he retired in 1996. He didn’t stay away long, though. Quickly finding retirement boring, he returned to the school to work part time.

Carnage was built on a hog farm. The area was wooded, and a cornfield sat to the north of the school. Southeast Raleigh has become more urban over the decades as downtown’s growth has expanded outward.

When the school opened, Carnage students and administrators treated it with respect, said principal Pamela Johnson.

She would know: Johnson, 55, was a student at Carnage in its second year. She remembers Gordon as a kind man who “took no mess.”

The school’s first principal, George Foxwell Sr., went to great lengths to protect the new building. If students weren’t playing sports, he made them remove their shoes while standing on the gymnasium floor.

“When we had a dance, it was called a sock hop for a reason,” Johnson said.

Gordon and his custodial staff planted tiny pine saplings between the school and the athletic fields, and students were frequently scolded for trampling the plants.

When Johnson returned to Carnage three years ago as principal, she found a stand of pines towering over the school.

“A forest grew up and got old,” Gordon said.

Push for integration

The school is named for civil rights leader Fred J. Carnage, the grandson of a slave. Carnage was born in Georgia and attended Morgan College in Baltimore before studying law at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

He opened a law office in Raleigh in 1932, becoming one of two black lawyers in the city. He worked out of the same Hargett Street office until his death at the age of 93.

He was named to the Raleigh school board in 1949 – the second African-American ever appointed to a North Carolina school board. (The Raleigh and Wake County school boards operated separately until 1976.)

Carnage organized the Negro Voters League in the 1930s and defended three Shaw University black students arrested in 1961 for sitting at a restaurant counter that only served whites.

Raleigh public schools began to integrate in 1960. In 1961, Carnage was the only Raleigh school board member to vote for the admission of a 14-year-old black student to the all-white Broughton High School.

“The sooner a few Negro children enter these schools and the public finds they are just like other children, the sooner the whole thing will be settled,” Carnage reportedly told his fellow board members.

‘Happy people’

On a recent morning, Gordon walked the second-floor halls of Carnage. He noticed a loose screw had begun working its way out of a set of double doors, causing it to close improperly. Along a staircase, he noticed the wiggle of a loose handrail and paused to take a closer look.

“It’s something all the time,” he said.

Gordon said he enjoys being a custodian, and he keeps working because he loves the staff’s positive attitudes.

“Getting here and seeing all these happy people in the building,” Gordon said. “I guess that’s the best thing about coming.”

Most days he leaves work a little before noon, and then he tends to his garden at his Southeast Raleigh home, earns extra money mowing lawns, checks on three of his sisters and sometimes goes fishing.

He married in 1964, but divorced after 20 years. He has three sons, the oldest now 52.

Gordon said his son recently suggested he would have time to relax if he stopped working at Carnage.

“I told him I ain’t ready to quit working,” he said. “I’ll give it another year or two before I throw the towel in.”

This story was originally published April 15, 2016 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Carnage Middle celebrates 50th anniversary, and so does school’s custodian."