Overview
Ben Carson overcame his troubled youth in inner-city Detroit to become a neurosurgeon famous for successfully separating conjoined twins. In 2015, he became one of many candidates seeking to gain the official Republican presidential nomination.
Ben Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951. His mother, though under-educated herself, pushed her sons to read and to believe in themselves. Carson went from being a poor student to receiving academic honors and eventually attending medical school. As a doctor, he became director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 33 and earned fame for his groundbreaking work separating conjoined twins. In 2015 he announced that he was running for the following year's presidential election, hoping to gain the Republican nomination. He is one of the party's leading candidates in the polls.
Birth and Family Background
Benjamin Solomon Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951, the second son of Sonya and Robert Solomon Carson. His mother was raised in Tennessee in a very large family and dropped out of school in the third grade. With limited prospects in life, she married Baptist minister and factory worker Robert Carson when she was 13. The couple moved to Detroit and had two children. But Sonya eventually discovered her husband was a bigamist and had another secret family. The two divorced, with Robert going to live with his other family and thus leaving Sonya and her children financially devastated.
Influential Mother
Ben was 8 and Curtis, his brother, was 10 when Sonya began to raise them as a single mother, reportedly moving to Boston to live with her sister for a time and eventually returning to Detroit. The family was very poor and to make ends meet Sonya sometimes toiled at two or three jobs simultaneously in order to provide for her boys. Most of the jobs she had was as a domestic worker.
As Carson later detailed in his autobiography, his mother was frugal with the family's finances, cleaning and patching clothes from the Goodwill in order to dress the boys. The family would also go to local farmers and offer to pick vegetables in exchange for a portion of the yield. Sonya would then can the produce for the kids' meals. Her actions, and the way she managed the family, proved to be a tremendous influence on Ben and Curtis.
Sonya also taught her boys that anything was possible. By his recollection many years later, Carson had thoughts of a career in medicine. Because his family was on medical assistance, they would have to wait for hours to be seen by one of the interns at hospitals in Boston or Detroit. Ben would listen to the pulse of the hospital as doctors and nurses went about their routines, fantasizing that one day they'd be calling for a "Dr. Carson."
Power of Reading
Both Carson and his brother experienced difficulty in school. Ben fell to the bottom of his class and became the object of ridicule by his classmates. Determined to turn her sons around, Sonya limited their TV time to a few select programs and refused to let them go outside to play until they'd finished their homework.
She required them to read two library books a week and give her written reports, even though with her poor education, she could barely read them. At first, Ben resented the strict regimen, but after several weeks, he began to find enjoyment in reading, discovering he could go anyplace, be anybody and do anything between the covers of a book.
Ben began to learn how to use his imagination and found it more enjoyable than watching television. This attraction to reading soon led to a strong desire to learn more. Carson read literature on all types of subjects, seeing himself as the central character of what he was reading, even if it was a technical book or an encyclopedia.
Carson would later say that he began to view his prospects differently, that he could become the scientist or physician he had dreamed about, and thus, he cultivated an academic focus. A fifth grade science teacher was one of the first to encourage Carson's interests in lab work after the youngster was the only student able to identify an obsidian rock sample brought to school.
Within a year, Carson was amazing his teachers and classmates with his scholastic improvement. The children's books he read, while he was confined to quarters, now had true educational relevancy. He was able to recall facts and examples from his books at home and relate them to what he was learning in school.
Still, there were challenges. After Carson received a certificate of achievement in the eighth grade for being at the top of his class, a teacher openly berated his fellow white students for letting a black boy get ahead of them academically.
At Southwestern High School in inner-city Detroit, Carson's science teachers recognized his intellectual abilities and mentored him further. Other educators helped him to stay focused when outside influences pulled him off course.
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