Ben Carson went from being a poor student to receiving academic honors and eventually attending med school and at age 33 and earned fame for his groundbreaking work separating conjoined twins. But where did he grow up?
Ben Carson grew up in Detroit, MI. He attended Southwestern High School, followed by Yale University and then the University of Michigan Medical School.
Read more below about the neighbourhoods in which Carson grew up and how he went from poverty to politics.
From Poverty to Politics
An audit of Carson’s adolescence exhibits that he lived in independent, private houses — yet not generally in monetarily stable neighborhoods and he and his family moved around a lot.
The details are somewhat cloudy about Carson’s initial life.
His mom, Sonya Carson, was born Johnie Lou Copeland in Georgia. She lived in Tennessee at around the time she was hitched to Robert Carson, at 13 years old (as indicated by Carson’s recounting the story). They moved to Detroit, where, in 1950, they bought a great deal on Deacon Street for $1, as per records acquired by the Daily Mail.
Carson was brought into the world the following year, and the family lived in the house in that area, 1860 Deacon St.
In the end, to set aside cash, the family – without Robert, after Carson’s folks separated – moved from Detroit to Boston, leasing the Deacon Street home. In Boston, they lived with Carson’s auntie and uncle in two unique homes, as indicated by the Boston Globe.
One was a three-story expansion on Glenway Street.
The other was a solitary family home on Stanwood Street. It was destroyed to manufacture a market sooner or later after the Carsons lived there, yet on a 1931 guide of the Roxbury neighborhood, the house is recorded as having a place with “A Rosengarter.”
In the end, the family moved back to Detroit, living from the start in what Carson has portrayed as “a multifamily abiding” over a lot of railroad tracks from the city’s Delray neighborhood.
It’s not satisfactorily clear where this was, precisely, however none of the city’s open lodging ventures, past or present, are in the region.
It is a generally modern region, limited by waterways on different sides and on the north by Interstate 75, which was likely under development near the time that the Carsons lived there. Railroad tracks jumble the region. It’s not clear which were the ones Carson’s family lived close to.
Eventually the family moved back to Deacon Street.
In a written statement, Carson said, “I understand what it means to be poor because I grew up poor, I was fortunate to have my mother who was my compass — always steering me on course, helping me to see beyond our circumstances.
Physician or Politician?
By 1973, Carson had graduated from med school and 24 years into his career, he and his team had separated conjoined twins who were bound at the head, in a very challenging operation – this later became one of the things that Carson was well-known for.
He later retired from his medical career and entered the presidential race of 2016. Revealing his reasons, Carson said, “I don’t want to be a politician because politicians do what is politically expedient. I want to do what’s right.”
Although his rallies were filled with enthusiasm and fire, Carson’s campaign didn’t gain much momentum and later became one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters as the race was nearing the finish line.
Being a Trump fan seems to have paid off for Carson as he later was elected as the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by President Trump.
While Carson clearly enjoys involvement in American politics, it’s clear that his true roots lie in the medical realm where his heart belongs and he wants what is right for all.