Michael Oher is an African American who grew up as an extremely impoverished child in the ghettos of Memphis Tennessee. Oher was from a place called Hurt Village, a housing project in North Memphis, where he was one of twelve families growing up in broken homes and low socio-economic neighborhoods. Michael witnessed violence, poverty, drug use, and gang activity every day. This essay paper will examine Ohers childhood and family and learn more about Ohers life.
Ohers Family Life
Ohers biological mother was a drug addicted with a neglecting uninvolved parenting style. At times she seemed to forget that she had children and would leave for long periods of time, leaving Oher and his siblings to fend for themselves. Michael had no accountability for schooling; he had very little education and a handful of skills. There were no books in the home and no one there to read to Michael, literacy and encouragements were not supported in the home. Oher had been in schools in 9 years and often skipped class. This was due to his mother who was never around and later he was taken from her and put into a foster home, where he moved around from one home to the next. Ohers mother did not enforce any rules and provided no emotional response to anything, and never said I love you. Ohers father was absent from Ohers life and later as a teen discovered that he had been murdered and thrown from an overpass on the Westside of Memphis. Oher and his siblings shared a strong bond of being neglected and consistently having to look out for themselves and each other. They feared being split up and placed into separate foster care homes. Michael and his siblings felt that the representatives from the state government child protective services were the people who were going to separate them and break the bond they. Eventually the state had enough evidence of neglect, endangerment, and abuse that they filed an order of protective custody to put Oher and his siblings in foster care. Michael was tired of letting other people make decisions for him, so he became a runner and would regularly run away from his fos
ter home, back to his mothers house. Due to the running he was moved around from one foster home to another. With every house change there was a school change. Once in the system Oher thought there were too many rules, and none of the foster parents cared or could love a kid after being dumped on their doorstep. Oher had problems with trusting people, because of so much experience with neglect over the years. Oher felt betrayed because no one asked him what he wanted or how he felt. Oher now a teen took it upon himself that he would rather be homeless. The Tuohys Oher eventually started a new school Wingate Christian School (Briarcrest Christian School), in which a man named Tony Henderson (Tony Hamilton) helped Oher get into. Michael had to complete a home study program to bring his grades up prior to being admitted. Henderson ran an athletic program that mentored teens in the neighborhood. Hamilton recognized that Oher had an unstable home life and took him in. Hamilton noticed that Oher was very quiet and pretty much stayed to himself. He is shown to have a kind of childish personality, because he tries to play with kindergarten children who reject or ignore him. Michael is befriended by SJ Tuohy, the youngest Tuohy, whose connection to Michael starts the ball rolling. One of his teachers seen that Oher had been struggling with his education, his teacher noticed that Oher did not know how to read. Mrs. Boswell (Mrs. Beasley) Ohers biology teacher found potential in Oher after giving Oher a verbal test. Mrs. Beasley noticed that Oher did much better in school when he was given tests orally. This is where he met the family that would eventually adopt him, the Tuohys. The Tuohy family is a rich white American family that saw Oher struggling and homeless. The Tuohys offers Oher help by buying him clothes and giving him a place to stay. The Tuohys are very compassionate family that seen something in Oher. This is when things for Oher started to change in a good way. When the Tuohys adopted Oher into their family Oher mentioned that he felt like a part of the family, he felt loved.