Celebrate Black History Month: Joycelyn Elders

AP_9409200103-645x645.jpg

Joycelyn Elders is a pediatrician and outspoken public health advocate who served as the first African American Surgeon General of the United States.

Elders was born August 13, 1933, in Schaal Arkansas, to a family of sharecroppers and the first of 8 children. At 15, she entered Philander Smith College, a historically black liberal arts college in Little Rock, Arkansas, on a scholarship from the United Methodist Church. That same year she saw a doctor for the first time in her life and decided to become a physician herself.

After 3 years, she graduated and joined the Army. In 1956 she enrolled at the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock on the GI Bill. At medical school, Elders was one of three black students and the only black woman student. While Elders was able to attend classes with her white classmates (the Supreme Court had declared separate but equal education unconstitutional two years earlier) she couldn’t eat with them at the white-only cafeteria. 

Elders graduated with her M.D. in 1960 and went on complete her residency in Little Rock where she was appointed chief pediatric resident and specialized in pediatric endocrinology. During this time Elders became an advocate for issues regarding adolescent sexuality, particularly teen pregnancy and contraception. 

By the late 1980s, 20% of children born in Arkansas were from teenage mothers, which then Governor, Bill Clinton, considered a social and fiscal crisis. So, in 1987 Clinton appointed Elders to the Office of Director of Public Health. During this time she instituted a controversial program to dispense contraceptives to public school students, promoted public awareness of AIDS and teen pregnancy, and successfully lobbied for a mandated K-12 sex education program that focused on personal responsibility, hygiene, and substance abuse prevention.

In 1993, Elders was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the post of. U.S. Surgeon General. She was only the second black person to be tapped for a cabinet-level position. Elders’ nomination was met with strong opposition from conservatives at the time because of her outspokenness on sex education, but she was eventually confirmed. As surgeon general, Elders focused on several health issues: tobacco-related disease, AIDS, and alcohol and drug abuse; she also continued her advocacy for sex education. She played an important role in Clinton’s early efforts to reorganize the health care system, and she regularly urged the public to consider unorthodox solutions to public health problems. Some of her suggestions concerning sex education in public schools, however, caused great controversy, and in December 1994 Clinton asked her to resign.

Elders returned to the University of Arkansas as a faculty researcher and professor of pediatric endocrinology at the Arkansas Children's Hospital. As of 2021 and now retired from practice, Elders serves as professor emerita at the University of Arkansas School of Medicine and remains active in public health education often advocating for comprehensive sexual health education and speaking out against teen pregnancy.


Sources:

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/joycelyn-elders-2240/

https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_98.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joycelyn_Elders

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joycelyn-Elders

Annie Wilson