GROWING UP

Benjamin Solomon Carson was born in 1951 in Detroit, Michigan. When he was 8, his father left the family and his parents were divorced. Carson, his older brother Curtis, and his mother Sonya moved to Boston to live with relatives for a year, before returning to Detroit's inner city, where Carson would spend most of his boyhood. Thrust into a world of poverty after her divorce, Sonya Carson, with only a third-grade education, worked as a domestic to provide for her boys. She turned for comfort and strength to the teachings of the Seventh Day Adventist church. It was there, while listening to a sermon, that Carson decided to pursue medicine, initially as a missionary, and discovered the safe haven and strength God and scriptures afforded.

Drawing upon her faith in God, and the power of positive thinking and the intellect to solve problems, Sonya Carson set about laying the academic and moral groundwork that would transform Carson's life and help make his dreams for success a reality. When the family returned to Detroit in 1960, Carson found himself at the bottom of his class in the predominately white Higgens Elementary school. Years later the then famous surgeon Ben Carson, M.D., would describe himself as the fifth-grade "class dummy," a child who, taunted by classmates and ignored by teachers, was soon convinced of his own stupidity and that being black meant the world was stacked against him. Two events his fifth grade year changed his perception of the world and his ability.

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