a reply to:
UKTruth
1)Ben Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951. His mother, though under-educated herself, pushed her sons to read and 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. He
retired from medicine in 2013, and two years later he entered politics, making a bid to become the Republican candidate for U.S. president. After
struggling in the primary elections, Carson dropped out of the race in March 2016, and then became a vocal supporter of Republican nominee and former
rival Donald Trump. After Trump was elected president, he nominated Carson to become the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development.
2) 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. After the couple divorced, Robert moved in with his other family, leaving Sonya and her children financially
devastated.
3) 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.
4) Sonya would then can the produce for the her childrens' 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. For medical care, his family would have to wait for hours to be seen by one of the interns at hospitals in Boston or Detroit. Carson
observed the hospital as doctors and nurses went about their routines, dreaming that one day they would be calling for a "Dr. Carson."
5) 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 had 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 about 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.
6) 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 he 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
academic improvement. 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.
7) Despite his academic successes, Carson had a raging temper that translated into violent behavior as a child. In his autobiography, he stated that
he once tried to hit his mother with a hammer because she disagreed with his choice of clothes. (His mother had in fact said in a 1988 Detroit Free
Press article that she was the one wielding the hammer, with her other son Curtis intervening in the argument.) At another time, he claimed to have
inflicted a head injury on a classmate in a dispute at his locker. In a final incident, Ben said he nearly stabbed a friend after arguing over a
choice of radio stations. According to Carson, the only thing that prevented a tragic event was the knife blade allegedly broke on the friend's belt
buckle. Not knowing the extent of his friend's injury, Carson ran home and locked himself in the bathroom with a Bible. Terrified by his own actions,
he started praying, asking God to help him find a way to deal with his temper, finding salvation in the Book of Proverbs. Carson began to realize that
much of his anger stemmed from constantly putting himself in the center of events happening around him.
8) Carson graduated with honors from Southwestern, having also become a senior commander in the school's ROTC program. He earned a full scholarship to
Yale, receiving a B.A. degree in psychology in 1973. Carson enrolled in the School of Medicine at the University of Michigan, choosing to become a
neurosurgeon. In 1975, he married Lacena "Candy" Rustin, whom he met at Yale. Carson earned his medical degree, and the young couple moved to
Baltimore, Maryland, where he became an intern at Johns Hopkins University in 1977. His excellent eye-hand coordination and three-dimensional
reasoning skills made him a superior surgeon early on. By 1982, he was chief resident in neurosurgery at Hopkins.In 1983, Carson received an important
invitation. Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Australia, needed a neurosurgeon and invited Carson to take the position. Resistant at first to
move so far away from home, he eventually accepted the offer. It proved to be an important one. Australia at the time was lacking doctors with highly
sophisticated training in neurosurgery. Carson gained several years worth of experience in the year he was at Gairdner Hospital and honed his skills
tremendously.