Ben Carson
Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. is an American retired neurosurgeon, academic, author, and government official who served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021. A pioneer in the field of neurosurgery, he ran for president of the United States in the 2016 Republican primaries. Carson is one of the most prominent black conservatives in the United States.
Carson became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the United States in 1984, when he took the job at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center at age 33. In 1987, he gained fame for leading a team of surgeons in the first-known separation of conjoined twins joined at the back of the head. He performed the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside the womb, developed new methods to treat brain-stem tumors, and revitalized hemispherectomy techniques for controlling seizures. He has written more than 100 neurosurgical publications. He retired from medicine in 2013; at the time, he was professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Carson gained national fame among political conservatives after delivering a speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast that was perceived as critical of the policies of President Barack Obama. After widespread speculation about a presidential run, Carson announced his campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination for president in May 2015. Carson performed strongly in early polls and was considered a frontrunner for the nomination in fall 2015, but did poorly in the primaries and withdrew from the race after Super Tuesday. He subsequently endorsed Donald Trump, who as president nominated him to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He was confirmed by the United States Senate, 58–41, on March 2, 2017.
Carson has received numerous honors for his neurosurgery work, including more than 70 honorary doctorate degrees and numerous national merit citations. In 2001, he was named by CNN and Time magazine as one of the nation's 20 foremost physicians and scientists and was named by the Library of Congress as one of 89 "Living Legends" on its 200th anniversary. In 2008, Carson was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2010, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He was the subject of the 2009 biographical television film Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, in which he was portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr.
Early life and education
Carson's parents were Robert Solomon Carson Jr., a World War II U.S. Army veteran, and Sonya Carson. Both from large families in rural Georgia, Carson's parents met and married while living in rural Tennessee, when his mother was 13 and his father 28. After Robert's completion of military service, they moved from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Detroit, Michigan, where they lived in a large house in the Indian Village neighborhood. Carson's father, a Baptist minister, worked in a Cadillac automobile plant. His older brother, Curtis, was born in 1949, when his mother was 20. In 1950, Carson's parents purchased a new 733-square-foot single-family detached home on Deacon Street in the Boynton neighborhood of southwest Detroit, where Carson was born on September 18, 1951.Carson's Detroit Public Schools education began in 1956 with kindergarten at the Fisher School and continued through first, second, and the first half of third grade, during which time he was an average student. When Carson was five years old, his mother learned that his father had a prior family and had not divorced his first wife. In 1959, when he was eight, his parents separated and he moved with his mother and brother to live for two years with his mother's Seventh-day Adventist older sister and brother-in-law in multi-family dwellings in the Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. In Boston, Carson's mother attempted suicide, had several psychiatric hospitalizations for depression, and for the first time began working outside the home, as a domestic worker, while Carson and his brother attended a two-classroom school at the Berea Seventh-day Adventist church where two teachers taught eight grades, and the vast majority of time was spent singing songs and playing games.
In 1961, at the age of 10, Carson moved with his mother and brother back to southwest Detroit, where they lived in a multi-family dwelling in a primarily white neighborhood, Springwells Village, while renting out their house on Deacon Street, which his mother had received in her divorce settlement. When they returned to Detroit public schools, Carson and his brother's academic performance initially lagged far behind their new classmates, having, according to Carson, "essentially lost a year of school" by attending the small Seventh-day Adventist parochial school in Boston, but they both improved when their mother limited their time watching television and required them to read and write book reports on two library books per week. Carson attended the predominantly white Higgins Elementary School for fifth and sixth grades and the predominantly white Wilson Junior High School for seventh and the first half of eighth grade. In 1965, at the age of 13, he moved with his mother and brother back to their house on Deacon Street. He attended the predominantly black Hunter Junior High School for the second half of eighth grade. At the age of eight, Carson dreamt of becoming a missionary doctor, but five years later he aspired to the lucrative lifestyles of psychiatrists portrayed on television, and his brother bought him a subscription to Psychology Today for his 13th birthday.
High school
By grade 9, the family's financial situation had improved. His mother surprised neighbors by paying cash to buy a new Chrysler car, and the only government assistance they still relied on was food stamps. Carson attended the predominantly black Southwestern High School for grades nine through twelve, graduating third in his class academically. In high school, he played the euphonium in band and participated in forensics, chess club, and the U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program where he reached its highest rank—cadet colonel. Carson served as a laboratory assistant in the high school's biology, chemistry, and physics school laboratories beginning in grades 10, 11, and 12, respectively, and worked as a biology laboratory assistant at Wayne State University the summer between grades 11 and 12.In his book Gifted Hands, Carson relates that as a youth, he had a violent temper. "As a teenager, I would go after people with rocks, and bricks, and baseball bats, and hammers", Carson told NBC's Meet the Press in October 2015. He said he once tried to hit his mother on the head with a hammer over a clothing dispute, while in the ninth grade he tried to stab a friend who had changed the radio station. Fortunately, the blade broke in his friend's belt buckle. Carson said the intended victim, whose identity he wants to protect, was a classmate, a friend, or a close relative. After this incident, Carson said he began reading the Book of Proverbs and applying verses on anger. As a result, he states he "never had another problem with temper". In his various books and at campaign events, he repeated these stories and said he once attacked a schoolmate with a combination lock. Nine friends, classmates, and neighbors who grew up with him told CNN in 2015 they did not remember the anger or violence he has described. In response, Carson posted on Facebook a 1997 Parade magazine issue, in which his mother verified the stabbing incident. He then questioned the extent of the effort CNN had exerted in the investigation.
Carson has said that he protected white students in a biology lab after a race riot broke out at his high school in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the riot but could not find anyone who remembered Carson sheltering white students.
College
He wanted to attend college farther away than his brother who was at the University of Michigan. Carson says he narrowed his college choices to Harvard or Yale but could only afford the $10 application fee to apply for only one of them. He said he decided to apply to Yale after seeing a team from Yale defeat a team from Harvard on the G.E. College Bowl television show. Carson was accepted by Yale and offered a full scholarship covering tuition, room and board. In 1973, Carson graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Yale "with a fairly respectable grade point average although far from the top of the class".Carson does not say in his books whether he received a college student deferment during the Vietnam War. He does say that his older brother, then a student at the University of Michigan, received a low number in the first draft lottery in 1969 and was able to enlist in the Navy for four years instead of being drafted, whereas he received a high number in the second draft lottery in 1970. Carson said he would have readily accepted his responsibility to fight had he been drafted, but he "identified strongly with the anti-war protesters and the revolutionaries" and enthusiastically voted for anti-war Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. In his book, America the Beautiful, Carson said, "The Vietnam War was, in retrospect, not a noble conflict. It brought shame to our nation because of both the outcome and the cause."
In the summers after he graduated from high school until his second year in medical school, Carson worked at a variety of jobs: as a clerk in the payroll office of Ford Motor Company, supervisor of a six-person crew picking up trash along the highway under a federal jobs program for inner-city students, a clerk in the mailroom of Young & Rubicam Advertising, assembling fender parts and inspecting back window louvers on the assembly line at Chrysler, a crane operator at Sennett Steel, and finally a radiology technician taking X-rays. At Yale, Carson had a part-time job on campus as a student police aide.
In his autobiography, Carson said he had been offered a scholarship to West Point. It is likely he means he was offered an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Cadets receive a free education and room and board in exchange for a commitment to serve in the military for at least five years after graduation. Carson also said the University of Michigan had offered him a scholarship. His staff later said the described scenario was similar to that of West Point, as he never actually applied for entry to the University of Michigan.
In his autobiography, Gifted Hands, Carson recounted that exams for a Yale psychology course he took his junior year, "Perceptions 301", were inexplicably burned, forcing students to retake the exam. Carson said other students walked out in protest when they discovered the retest was significantly harder than the original examination, but that he alone finished the test. On doing so, Carson said he was congratulated by the course instructor, who told him the retest was a hoax intended to find "the most honest student in the class". Carson said the professor awarded him $10 and that a photographer for the Yale Daily News was present to take his picture, which appeared in the student newspaper with a story about the experiment. Doubts were raised about this story in 2015 during Carson's presidential campaign. The Wall Street Journal attempted to verify Carson's account, reporting that Yale undergraduate courses were identified with only two digits in the early 1970s, that Yale had offered no course called "Perceptions 301" at the time, and that Carson's photo had never appeared in the Yale Daily News. Carson, while acknowledging the class number was not correct, said: "You know, when you write a book with a co-writer and you say that there was a class, a lot of time they'll put a number or something just to give it more meat. You know, obviously, decades later, I'm not going to remember the course number."