Dr. Ben Carson to Receive 91st Spingarn Medal

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2006 by Howell, Arnesa

Growing up in inner-city Detroit, Ben Carson never imagined he would one day be a world-renowned pediatrie neurosurgeon. Even while sitting in his office at Johns Hopkins University Hospital talking about his medical accomplishments including performing the first successful separation of conjoined twins in 1987 Carson is modest about his achievements.

"I look at people like Judge Damon Keith, one of my heroes, Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah - who has such a generous heart and came from horrendous circumstances - and civil rights people who put themselves on the line, and it's humbling to be included in their company," says Carson when speaking of his latest accolade as recipient of the NAACP's 91st Spingarn Award, its highest honor for achievement.

Leon Russell, a member of the Spingarn Award Committee, says Carson is very close to the ideal that award creator Joel Spingarn envisioned for an honoree - an African American who has made an outstanding achievement in art, science or other noteworthy profession. "His reputation and expertise in the area of medicine sets him apart," Russell says.

But long before Carson would receive the countless awards and recognition as one of the most gifted surgeons in pediatrie medicine, he was a young boy living in a poor neighborhood in Detroit. His parents divorced when he was 8, and Carson struggled in school.

"I didn't think I would understand the material, so I didn't pay attention," admits the soft-spoken Carson, 54. "I was in a White school, and the expectations for Black students weren't very high. And you tend to live up to expectations."

That is until his mother, Sonya, saw her son going down the wrong path and decided to step in. As a fifth grader, Carson ranked last in his class. His mom asked God for wisdom and came up with the idea of limiting the amount of television her children watched to only two or three days a week. The rest of the time Carson and his brother, Curtis, each had to read two books every week and submit written book reports. They had no idea their mother, who was a domestic with only a third-grade education, couldn't read what they were writing.

"It wasn't long before I discovered between the covers of those books I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything," Carson says. "I soon began to know things no one else knew, and I liked that sense of empowerment."

Within a year-and-a half, he was at the top of the class. But one problem persisted - he had a violent temper. At age 14, Carson recalls, he almost stabbed another young boy. Fortunately, the other child had a metal belt buckle under his clothing that blocked the knife.

"I locked myself in the bathroom and started thinking about my life, and I realized that even though I managed to turn things around academically... I knew that temper would land me in jail, or reform school, or the grave. None of those options appealed to me," Carson says.

In the bathroom that day, Carson says he dropped to his knees in prayer and asked God for help controlling his temper. Then he opened up a nearby Bible and turned to the Book of Proverbs and read passage after passage about anger.

"It seemed like they were all written about me," Carson recalls with a chuckle.

It was during those three hours that he decided lashing out at the world and going after other people with baseball bats were not signs of strength, but of weakness. And with that revelation, anger was never again an issue.

Carson would go on to graduate number three in his high school class and win a scholarship to Yale University. But as a freshman at the Ivy-League university, Carson found himself failing chemistry. One night, he says, he dreamed he was in a large auditorium where a nebulous figure worked chemistry problems on a blackboard. Carson says he woke up the next morning and immediately went to his desk and studied the subject matter he'd dreamt about. It happened to be the same material on his chemistry test, which he aced.

"That indicated to me that God really wanted me to go into medicine and he had something special for me to do in medicine," says Carson.

Gifted Hands, Gifted Minds

In 1984, at the age of 33, Carson was named chief of pediatrie neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore, becoming the youngest chief of pediatrie neurosurgery in the nation. It wasn't long before he took on surgeries that would change lives while bringing him international acclaim.

Carson pioneered the successful hemispherectomy - an extremely risky surgery where half the brain is removed to control severe seizures - a year after taking his new position at Johns Hopkins. And in 1987, he led a 70-member medical team in a 22-hour surgery to separate 7-month-old conjoined German twins successfully.

"About 20 years ago, it was almost unheard of to survive a surgery with that type of complexity," says Keith Black, 48, chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and a member of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, alongside Carson.