Joycelyn Elders

Joycelyn Elders (born 1933) is an American pediatrician and public health administrator who served as Surgeon General of the United States from 1993 to 1994, the first African American and the second woman to hold the post. Born Minnie Lee Jones to a sharecropping family in Schaal, Arkansas, she studied biology at Philander Smith College, trained as a physical therapist in the Army and earned her medical degree at the University of Arkansas in 1960. She became a professor of pediatrics there and in 1978 the first person in Arkansas board certified as a pediatric endocrinologist. In 1987 Governor Bill Clinton made her director of the Arkansas Department of Health, where she widened birth control, counselling and sex education at school clinics and raised childhood screening and immunization. As Surgeon General she spoke frankly on contraception in schools, drug legalization and masturbation, and she resigned in December 1994 amid the controversy. She is professor emerita of pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.