Free Republic

In his 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands,” Mr. Carson writes of a Yale psychology professor who told Mr. Carson, then a junior, and the other students in the class—identified by Mr. Carson as Perceptions 301—that their final exam papers had “inadvertently burned,” requiring all 150 students to retake it. The new exam, Mr. Carson recalled in the book, was much tougher. All the students but Mr. Carson walked out. “The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture,” Mr. Carson wrote. “ ‘A hoax,’ the teacher said. ‘We wanted...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yeah, well, we were just poking along here about 10 minutes ago. It looked like it was actually gonna be kind of a slow day. And then everything blew up here, and then we -- JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it's Open Line Friday! RUSH: Yeah. And I still don't know what to make of this. There's something that smells about this still, and I can't put my fingers on it. But we're gonna have to get into it. Anyway, welcome to Open Line Friday. Whatever you want to talk about is fine and...

The black man courting crowds of white conservatives doesn’t seem like the same guy that H. Westley Phillips once idolized. Phillips still relishes the day he heard Ben Carson inspire minority students at Yale University with his story of persistence. He can still feel the nervous anticipation he had while waiting in line to shake Carson’s hand. After the speech, Phillips followed Carson’s path and... “I had come from a public school in Tulsa and came from a single-parent household and thought I was the admissions mistake,” said Phillips, now 27. “But he gave me the comfort to know that...

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...