“You can’t educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly
can’t keep them healthy if they’re not educated.”
— Joycelyn Elders
Point 1
Born Minnie Lee Jones in Schaal, Arkansas, to a poor farm sharecropping family, and was the eldest of eight children, and valedictorian of her school class.
Point 2
Earned a scholarship to the all-black Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father did not want to let her go, however, her grandmother persuaded Elders’s father to let her attend. Her family picked extra cotton to earn the $3.43 for her bus fare to Little Rock, and she became the first in her family to attend college.
Point 3
After graduating from college, she joined the U.S. Army’s Women’s Medical Specialist Corps. In 1956 she entered the Arkansas Medical School on the G.I. Bill, which provided financial aid for schooling to former members of the armed forces. During this time she met her second husband, Oliver Elders, and they married in 1960.
“Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is about jobs and employment, education, the environment, and all of those things that go into making us healthy.”
— Joycelyn Elders
Point 4
President Clinton’s nomination of Elders for the post of U.S. surgeon general made her the second African American and fifth woman to be chosen for a cabinet position.
Point 5
In January 1995 Elders returned to the University of Arkansas as a faculty researcher and a professor of pediatric endocrinology at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
Joycelyn Elders – Wikipedia
Joycelyn Elders Biography – family, childhood, children, parents, name …