Additional concerns about stories from Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson's past were raised Friday, including one about him saving white students at his Detroit high school from being hurt by black students in rioting the day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968.
The Wall Street Journal reported that efforts to confirm some of the stories that the retired pediatric neurosurgeon told staffers in interviews or that were published in his 1996 autobiography,
"Gifted Hands," were not successful.
"The threat to the Carson candidacy is that the inconsistencies or hard-to-check anecdotes, which were told long before he ever considered a presidential run, will put off voters only now getting to know him," the Journal said in the report.
The stories include:
- The 1968 incident, in which Carson hid white students in a biology lab that he had the keys to during his junior year at Southwestern High School. A half-dozen students and Carson's physics teacher could not confirm the story that he told Journal reporters.
- Carson having his picture snapped by the Yale Daily News after students walked out of class to protest having to retake a test. Carson remained seated. The Yale psychology professor called it a hoax, Carson said in his book. The newspaper's archives do not show a picture ever being published.
- The story he told a radio interviewer last month that he had been held up at a Popeye's restaurant near the Johns Hopkins University as a young doctor. Baltimore police have since said they could not find a report of the incident.
Barry Bennett, Carson's campaign manager, told the Journal that there was “no evidence” that any aspect of the neurosurgeon's biography wasn’t true.
"There’s no facts saying they are not true," he said. "We are guilty until proven innocent."
"You have no reason to believe that they are not true," Bennett added."There’s no evidence to point to the fact that they are even questionable."
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