Dr. Benjamin Carson Escaped The Ghetto With Mother’s Help

Dr. Ben Carson made a lot of news lately when he spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. Ben Carson is a world famous pediatric neurosurgeon who spoke with both humility and humor about early academic challenges and later success. At the national prayer breakfast Carson spoke truth to the powerful people in Washington about common sense solutions for national health care and our byzantine tax code. His speech created quite a stir.

Carson’s life story was told in the book and later movie entitled “Gifted Hands,”  and tells the unlikely story of a ghetto kid who rose to supreme academic success because of his remarkable mother. Mrs. Carson told her boys to turn off the television and start reading books. Carson’s mother may have lacked formal education but was blessed with Godly wisdom of someone seeking Godly help raising her two sons, both of whom have become successful. Praise God for the wisdom she heard of when she sought help from God.

A remarkable book titled “Gifted Hands” tells the personal story of Benjamin Carson, a black kid from the Detroit ghetto who went on to become a renowned neurosurgeon.

At one time young Ben Carson had the lowest grades in his middle-school class, and was the butt of teasing by his white classmates. Worse yet, he himself believed that he was just not smart enough to do the work.

Fortunately for him, his mother, whose own education went no further than the third grade, insisted that he was smart. She cut off the television set and made him and his brother hit the books — books that she herself could scarcely read.

As young Ben’s school work began to catch up with that of his classmates, and then began to surpass that of his classmates, his whole view of himself and of the wider world around him began to change. He began to think that he wanted to become a doctor.

There were a lot of obstacles to overcome along the way, including the fact that his mother had to be away from time to time for psychiatric treatment, as she tried to cope with the heavy pressures of trying to raise two boys whose father had deserted the family that she now had to support on a maid’s wages.

In many ways the obstacles facing young Ben Carson were like those faced by so many other youngsters in the ghetto. What was different was that he overcame those obstacles with the help of a truly heroic mother and the values she instilled in him.

It is an inspiring personal story, told plainly and unpretentiously, including the continuing challenges he faced later as a neurosurgeon operating on the brains of people with life-threatening medical problems, often with the odds against them.

To me it was a personal story in another sense, that some of his experiences as a youngster brought back experiences that I went through growing up in Harlem many years earlier.

I could understand all too well what it was like to be the lowest-performing child in a class. That was my situation in the fourth grade, after my family had moved up from the South, where I had been one of the best students in the third grade — but in a grossly inferior school system.

Now I sometimes found myself in tears because it was so hard to try to get through my homework.