For people who don’t believe in God, suspend your disbelief for a moment.

Because I need to tell you about how three black boys from three different cities all escaped dire circumstances to meet at Xavier University down in Louisiana and pledge to help each other become doctors.

They say God brought them together and kept them together until the last one had graduated medical school, until the last rotation was completed, until they opened their own practices. Now, they help pay to educate young men and women who look like them, so they are not the last.

If it sounds familiar, 16 years ago, three young black men formed a similar pact to do the same thing. The difference, these guys say, is there are still so few black doctors now that they’ve chosen to be living monuments to perseverance. Only about 5 percent of practicing physicians in 2015 were black, compared with a 13 percent African American population, according to a 2015 New York Times report. So these three are spending part of their salaries providing scholarships for future doctors.

That is what black Americans must do, not just in Detroit but across the country: We must stop asking others to do what we must do for our children.

The three doctors put themselves in a position to help by sharing their stories in a new book, “Pulse of Perseverance: Three Black Doctors on Their Journey to Success.” Their goal, to tell their stories to as many young people as possible, is how they wound up in Detroit Friday night at the Ford UAW headquarters, talking to the mentors and mentees in former Mayor Dave Bing’s mentorship program that matches young boys with professional mentors for four years.

The program, now in its fifth year, began with 40 young men. Seventy percent of those boys had never been to downtown Detroit, program manager Bob Warfield told the audience at the annual anniversary celebration for the Bing Youth Institute program.

"They knew their neighborhoods and their schools. We began to change things taking them to museums, corporate offices, college visits," Warfield said. And this year, all Bing Institute seniors graduated. Fourteen are now enrolled in college, and the other four are in skilled-trades training.

Detroit is undergoing two renaissances. One is being written about nationally that involves constructing buildings and increasing population. The other involves restoring and transforming lives, particularly of young men who, more and more, must become the heads of households, not heads of gangs, who must work for a living rather than live in a penal system designed for them.

That second renaissance is being led by men like Bing, and the mentors in his program, and those in programs across the city who are lifting up young people and offering them alternatives to the choiceless lives they thought they had. Bing’s program works because he is introducing his boys not just to new places and new ideas, but to new people who, like their mentors, can show them what success looks like.

On Friday night, Bing showed his boys the doctors, who were introduced by New York Times writer and MacArthur genius Nikole Hannah-Jones, who discovered them while writing about how their alma mater, a tiny historically black Xavier University of Louisiana that, at the time, graduated more black doctors than any college in the country.

"A lot of people had forgotten about you. A lot of people don't care about you. And then they wonder why you don't succeed," Bing told the young mentees in the audience. "To reach young people, you've got to get with them. You've got to believe in them."

His message should be the city's to all young men — and to young women: We believe in you.

Dr. Pierre Johnson

Dr. Johnson is a 38-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist at Chicago Metropolitan Hospital. But 35 years ago, he remembers running.

“I was three years old. My mother and I were running frantically down the street. I remember exactly where we were because we ran past my preschool. We were running from my father, who was high out of his mind, with a disheveled appearance in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt.”

That is from one of his chapters in “Pulse of Perseverance.” His decision to become a doctor came when he reached a crossroads.

“I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and I really wanted to play sports,” Johnson recalls in an interview. “…But when I got to college, I realized that I was under-prepared for the curriculum and it really came to a crossroads. Will I continue the rigors for something that wasn’t going to be fruitful? Or would I give it up and put my efforts into school. I was humbled, and I realized that one had to go.”

He chose medicine over basketball.

“I was challenged by my aunt. I wanted to play professional basketball. She told me to create Plan B,” he said. “My parents were both addicted to drugs, and as a kid, I saw a lot of violence and destruction. And I wanted better for my life. As I saw what was around me, I knew what I had to do to academically to get to a level of success. I was very fascinated by obstetrics and childbirth and I was very good with my hands, dexterity, so I thought that was something I definitely wanted to pursue.”

Dr. Max Madhere

Dr. Madhere, 38, is a cardiac anesthesiologist in Baton Rouge, La. But as a child, Madhere was caught in the middle of a devastating divorce between his mentally-ill mother and his father. His father moved him away from their mother to Washington, D.C. for a life safer than the one they were living in Brooklyn. His father would teach statistics at Howard University until his recent retirement.

“My father provided the first imprint of strong male leadership in my life,” he said. “The biggest thing he did for me early on was to talk about the struggles of black people in general, the story of African Americans in America, everything they had to deal with, everything they had to go through. …when I was in school, I tried to stay on task.

“I grew up during the tail end of the crack era, so even though I had positive influences in my home, dad couldn’t protect my siblings and me from the things we encountered in the neighborhoods,” he said. “I became a doctor because when we moved to Washington when it was still considered Chocolate City, the high school I went to was across the street from Howard University Hospital."

To meet a required 200-hour community service requirement to graduate, Madhere said he was “lazy” and went across the street to the nearby hospital.

“That changed my entire life,” he said. “I volunteered just to be an orderly, but what I saw was black people in positions of leadership, making key decisions every day, impacting people’s lives. So from that time on, I said 'I’m going to be a physician.' I kept my eyes on the prize and never changed.”

He did his residency at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, and he said he performed because he remembered those who gave so he could succeed.

Dr. Joseph Semien

Dr. Semien is a 40-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist at Lake Charles Memorial Hospital in Lake Charles, La. Despite being the son of a strong, Christian, New Orleans couple who are still married at 45 years and counting, he became a drug dealer.

“My dad definitely inspired us, but he lacked education,” Semien said. “My dad had a third-grade education. …One of the things I was exposed to was drugs. After seeing these things around me, I began to be curious, and I began to sell drugs myself.

This came after years of his being a disruptive student in class, doing things that included hitting a teacher in elementary school and Semien being whipped by his mother in front of the class.

His life changed with a devastating wake-up call.

“On October 14, 1996, when someone that I looked up to, someone that I felt inspired me in my life, was murdered. He was shot nine times,” he said. “At that moment, all of my dreams, everything that I wanted to do in my life that everyone said that I couldn’t accomplish, I was willing and pushed to pursue my goals. I wanted to become a doctor before I sold drugs. I wanted to become a doctor when my mom was in her room praying for me. I wanted to become a doctor when I was at home looking at all the animals around me (in science class), and dissecting them.”

So he decided to swap out the people in his life, find those who could inspire and hunker down.

'We started to push each other'

The doctors met at Xavier University of Louisiana, which they credit with paving their way to different medical schools and their current success. It was the place their bond was formed and their pledge to make each other doctors was sealed.

And, wouldn’t you know it? They met in the library.

“We were young men that had a dream and a vision to do something bigger than ourselves,” Johnson said. “When we found each other, we were all clinically depressed. Coming from where I came from, I got pretty good grades, …but I was never challenged at a school that did not challenge me for scholastic achievement. I’m sitting in there six, eight hours every day and failing. I did not see what God called me to do.

“Maxime’s from New York, and I’m from Chicago. And first we talked about Knicks and Bulls… But we looked at each other and saw just a look of determination… and even though we were both doing poorly at that time, we knew that we had the drive that nobody could put their finger on, so we really connected in the library. And …we started to push each other.”

"We looked up a couple of weeks later and saw another guy just sitting there with books sprawled out on the table, and we started up a conversation.”

That frustrated young man was Joseph Semien. And from that point through their arduous journeys at different medical schools across the country, they shared study guides, time and encouragement. They even demanded that each other take power naps when needed, knowing that someone would wake the other up.

“We said ‘We don’t know what tomorrow’s going to bring, but we know we can push together,'” Johnson said. “We sat there in the Xavier Library and decided we were going to push each other.”

Years of success later, each of the doctors woke up one day and realized that their personal achievement was not enough:

“I remember sitting in my office one day… and I looked on my wall and I saw all the degrees, my masters, my medical school degree,” Simeon said. “And I looked at all the things I had accomplished, but I was trying to figure out why I was not as happy as I should be…. It was because I needed to share something with someone else, to push someone not to achieve my goals, but even do better to go beyond what I had done.”

Madhere spoke of living in a 5,000-square foot home with his wife and three kids in a tony neighborhood and seeing no one that looked like him.

“For me that’s an absolute atrocity,” he said. “I had reached the American dream, but is that attainable for everybody who looks like me? Around that time, the constant news cycle was going. That was when Trayvon (Martin) got shot. That’s when Tamir Rice died. That’s when Eric Garner died. Philando Castile died… God was tugging on our shoulders, saying 'Hey, you guys have got to do something.'"

Madhere said that their success wouldn’t matter as much if they didn’t change the paradigm.

“From the time we’re young, we are programmed to believe in narratives,” he said. “All of our kids believe in a white Santa Claus. But for black kids, it could be really empowering, when you are subconsciously questioning your value at an early age, to see what you can be."

The doctors said that includes helping people to stop seeing black excellence as an anomaly.

“As I walk through the hospitals, I don’t change myself, mohawk, earrings, tattoos. Like the kids say, I keep it one hundred,” Johnson said. “To watch how people look at me…When I walk into a room, I’m everything in their eyes but a surgeon... And that’s not only from my colleagues. That’s from people who look like us. That’s what hurts me.”

“When we go to these schools, we don’t dress like this,” he said, pointing to his suit. “We keep it one hundred, jogging suits. We want to show them we’re not different than you. The first we ask is: What do we look like? And we get everything from rappers to party promoters. But then they see the book and the white coats, and it’s ‘O-h-h-h-h.' We’re tired of that narrative. We’re tired of the stereotypes. If we don’t believe it, how in the hell we going to get everybody else to believe it?”

Friday night, the doctors got the chance to teach that lesson to a self-declared future neurosurgeon. Fourteen-year-old Isaiah Bell, who opened the program by talking brilliantly about his mentor Kevin Tolbert, asked: “Was it hard for you to come together and be like brothers?”

Their advice, spoken by Johnson, was clear:

“What we understood was there is enough for everyone at the top,” Johnson told him. “…We knew that, together is much easier than trying to do this on our own. You have to realize that everybody in your school is not going to be on your side, but there’s two or three trying to do exactly what you’re trying to do, and that’s who you have to surround yourself with.”

Semien added: “All three of us will tell you we’re not highly intelligent, super-geniuses. We just worked really hard. When I talk to kids, they say man, ‘Doc, you’re like one of us, and I tell them I AM one of you.'”

And that’s how three boys whose beginnings didn’t predict their ends become doctors, keep their finger on the pulse of perseverance and make sure that, in the future, others will be able to tell similar success stories.

Contact Rochelle Riley at rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley. Get information about her book “The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery” at https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/burden