Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. (born September 18, 1951) is an American neurosurgeon, author and politician serving as the 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development since 2017, under the Trump Administration. Prior to his cabinet position, he was a candidate for President of the United States in the Republican primaries in 2016. Born in Detroit, Michigan, and a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School, Carson has authored numerous books on his medical career and political stances.

Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Robert Solomon Carson, Jr. (1914-1992), a World War II U.S. Army veteran, and his wife, Sonya Carson (nee Copeland; 1928-2017). Robert Carson was a Baptist minister, but later a Cadillac automobile plant laborer. Both of his parents came from large families in rural Georgia, and they were living in rural Tennessee when they met and married. Carson's mother was 13 and his father was 28 when they married, and after his father finished his military service, they moved from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Detroit, where they lived in a large house in the Indian Village neighborhood. Carson's older brother, Curtis, was born in 1949, when his mother was 20. In 1950, Carson's parents purchased a new 733-square foot single-family detached home on Deacon Street in the Boynton neighborhood in southwest Detroit.  Carson's Detroit Public Schools education began in 1956 with kindergarten at the Fisher School, and continued through first, second, and the first half of third grade, during which time he was an average student. When Carson was five, his mother learned that his father had a prior family and had not divorced his first wife. In 1959, when Carson was eight, his parents separated and he moved with mother and brother to live for two years with his mother's Seventh-day Adventist older sister and her sister's husband in multi-family dwellings in the Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. In Boston, Carson's mother attempted suicide, had several psychiatric hospitalizations for depression, and for the first time began working outside the home as a domestic worker, while Carson and his brother attended a two-classroom school at the Berea Seventh-day Adventist church where two teachers taught eight grades, and the vast majority of time was spent singing songs and playing games.  In 1961, when Carson was ten, he moved with his mother and brother back to southwest Detroit, where they lived in a multi-family dwelling in a primarily white neighborhood (Springwells Village) across the railroad tracks from the Delray neighborhood, while renting out their house on Deacon Street which his mother received in a divorce settlement. When they returned to Detroit public schools, Carson and his brother's academic performance initially lagged far behind their new classmates, having essentially lost a year of school by attending a Seventh-day Adventist church school in Boston, but both improved when their mother limited their time watching television and required them to read and write book reports on two library books per week. Carson attended the predominantly white Higgins Elementary School for fifth and sixth grades and the predominantly white Wilson Junior High School for seventh and the first half of eighth grade. In 1965, when Carson was 13, he moved with his mother and brother back to their house on Deacon Street. He attended the predominantly black Hunter Junior High School for the second half of eighth grade. When he was eight, Carson had dreamed of becoming a missionary doctor, but five years later he aspired to the lucrative lifestyles of psychiatrists portrayed on television, and his brother bought him a subscription to Psychology Today for his 13th birthday.

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