From 1987 to 1992, she nearly doubled childhood immunizations, expanded the state's prenatal care program, and increased home-care options for the chronically or terminally ill. Yet, largely because of her lobbying, in 1989 the Arkansas Legislature mandated a K-12 curriculum that included sex education, substance-abuse prevention, and programs to promote self-esteem. As she campaigned for clinics and expanded sex education, she caused a storm of controversy among conservatives and some religious groups. Governor Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders head of the Arkansas Department of Health in 1987. She helped her patients to control their fertility and advised them on the safest time to start a family. She saw that young women with diabetes face health risks if they become pregnant too younginclude spontaneous abortion and possible congenital abnormalities in the infant. This work led her to study of sexual behavior and her advocacy on behalf of adolescents. Over the next twenty years, Elders combined her clinical practice with research in pediatric endocrinology, publishing well over a hundred papers, most dealing with problems of growth and juvenile diabetes. She earned her master's degree in biochemistry in 1967, became an assistant professor of pediatrics at the university's Medical School in 1971, and full professor in 1976. Elders became chief resident in charge of the all-white, all-male residents and interns. She met her husband, Oliver Elders, while performing physical exams for the high school basketball team he managed, and they were married in 1960.Įlders did an internship in pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, and in 1961 returned to the University of Arkansas for her residency. Although the Supreme Court had declared separate but equal education unconstitutional two years earlier, Elders was still required to use a separate dining roomwhere the cleaning staff ate. After discharge in 1956 she enrolled at the University of Arkansas Medical School on the G.I. Elderswho had not even met a doctor until she was 16 years olddecided that becoming a physician was possible, and she wanted to be like Jones.Īfter college, Elders joined the Army and trained in physical therapy at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Her ambitions changed when she heard Edith Irby Jones, the first African American to attend the University of Arkansas Medical School, speak at a college sorority. In college, she enjoyed biology and chemistry, but thought that lab technician was likely her highest calling. While she scrubbed floors to pay for her tuition, her brothers and sisters picked extra cotton and did chores for neighbors to earn her $3.43 bus fare. They often missed school during harvest time, September to December.Īfter graduating from high school, she earned a scholarship to the all-black liberal arts Philander Smith College in Little Rock. She was the eldest of eight children, and she and her siblings had to combine work in the cotton fields from age 5 with their education at a segregated school thirteen miles from home. ![]() Long an outspoken advocate of public health, Elders was appointed Surgeon General by President Clinton in 1993.īorn to poor farming parents in 1933, Joycelyn Elders grew up in a rural, segregated, poverty-stricken pocket of Arkansas. Joycelyn Elders, the first person in the state of Arkansas to become board certified in pediatric endocrinology, was the fifteenth Surgeon General of the United States, the first African American and only the second woman to head the U.S.
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