"Obamacare is really, I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," he said. Later that year, Carson called it "the worst thing" in America since slavery. It turned out to be the launching point for plenty of criticism of the law. The speech was so popular it prompted the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page to write a piece entitled, "Ben Carson for President." He was harshly critical of both the Affordable Care Act and the president's fiscal policies. He skyrocketed to fame by condemning Obamacare at the National Prayer Breakfast: Carson spoke at the 1997 National Prayer Breakfast without incident but it was his remarks at that same breakfast in 2013 that propelled him to conservative stardom when he laid into the president who was sitting just a few feet away. "Any time anyone wanted to bring out any sort of inspirational figure for young black kids, especially young black boys, in Baltimore, you turned to Ben Carson."Ĥ. "I can't even count how many times I saw Ben Carson when I was a kid," writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in inner-city Baltimore in the 1980s and 1990s, said in a recent Carson profile in GQ magazine. His path made him a role model within the black community and Gifted Hands became recommended reading for young men. After that, he went on to Yale University and University of Michigan for medical school. He writes in Gifted Hands about how he prayed after the incident and it changed his life. As a teenager, he tried to stab a friend during an argument over which radio station to listen to, but the knife hit hid friend's belt buckle and snapped instead. He has been open about the fact that he was not always a model student, and struggled with anger issues as a child. And I think that led to both of our success," Carson said at a dinner for an Iowa Christian organization last fall. "The most important thing she did for myself and my brother: not accept excuses. But she placed a high premium on education and demanded that her two sons read two books each week from the Detroit Public Library and submit written reports on them instead of watching TV - even though she couldn't always understand what they wrote. He grew up poor in Detroit, the son of a single mother: The anchor of Carson's biography is that he was raised by a single mother with a third-grade education. The organization has awarded more than 6,700 scholarships since 1996, the first year the scholarship was offered, and give out more than 500 awards each year.Ĭarson has often spoken about the importance of education and how it affected his own journey from a poor Detroit neighborhood.ģ. In 1994, they established the Carson Scholars Fund to provide college scholarships to students who show academic excellence and perform community service. It made the New York Times bestseller list.Ĭarson and his wife, Candy, have also been active philanthropists. In August, another Carson book, One Nation - which outlines his political philosophy - outsold Hard Choices, the memoir authored by Hillary Clinton, last August when it sold 224,990 copies to Clinton's 222,822. His 1996 memoir, Gifted Hands, was made into a 2009 TV movie starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. He's also a successful author and philanthropist: Carson has authored a total of six books and a handful of them have done relatively well. In a press release announcing the honor, Johns Hopkins Children's Center noted that Carson was told "while performing a delicate seven-hour surgery."Ģ. Bush to award him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. It was that accomplishment in part that led former President George W. Other attempts at such an operation had almost always killed one or both twins. What first thrust Carson into the spotlight was his role as the primary surgeon on the first team to successfully separate a pair of conjoined twins who were connected at the head in 1997. He was also the first African-American to hold such a position. After medical school at the University of Michigan, he went to Johns Hopkins Hospital to do his residency and at 33 became the director of pediatric neurosurgery, the youngest physician to ever run a major division at the hospital. He is a renowned neurosurgeon: Though he was initially interested in psychiatry, Carson realized in medical school that he had the interests and abilities that aligned with the skills he would need as a neurosurgeon. Here are five things to know about Ben Carson:ġ.
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