If Ben Carson had listened to a college counselor, he might have dropped out of medical school.
Instead, Carson, the keynote speaker at Grand Valley's Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, completed medical school, earned a prestigious residency and eventually became a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon.
Carson told a record crowd of 1,500 students, faculty and staff members gathered in the Fieldhouse on January 16 that many people in the world are "discouragers," like the counselor who told Carson he "was not cut out for medicine," or the hospital nurses who mistook him for an orderly.
"When prejudice like that occurs, it's not that people are mean, just ignorant," he said.
Carson told the audience several more examples of prejudice that he encountered growing up in Detroit. After his parents divorced, his mother worked several jobs at a time to support their family. Despite having a third-grade education herself, she forced her two boys to read two library books a week, limited their television time and refused to let them play outside until their homework was complete.
Her strategy worked -- within a year, Carson was at the top of his class. After graduating from high school with honors, he earned a degree in psychology from Yale and then enrolled in medical school at The University of Michigan. He joined Johns Hopkins as a neurosurgery resident and at age 32 became the hospital's director of pediatric neurosurgery.
Carson said he has tried to follow King's principles and be more tolerant. He remembered being moved by watching television coverage of civil rights marches.
"People walking arm-in-arm ... there used to be a lot of unity between black and white people at that time," he said.
He urged students to push their peers to take up King's examples.
"We should be extremely happy that there is diversity. It's like having a bouquet of flowers," Carson said. "I pray that your generation goes further than my generation did."
Speaking at his last Grand Valley MLK celebration, President Mark A. Murray pressed the audience to reach across economic, racial and gender divisions.
"This day serves as a testament to what a very special gift Dr. King was to this country," Murray said. "Who's going to do the work now? ... We are."
