Joycelyn Elders (Published 1994) (2024)

On the desk of Dr. M. Joycelyn Elders, Surgeon General of the United States, sits an arrangement of faux roses fashioned from the red wrappers of several Lifestyles condoms. The bouquet says much about her. The first African-American (and the second woman) to serve as the nation's top doctor, the 60-year-old Elders is at once plain-spoken and salty. She is also a determined advocate of contraception, sex education and legal abortion, divisive issues that a more politic Surgeon General might soft-pedal.

But Elders enjoys a good fight. In Arkansas, where for five years she was Gov. Bill Clinton's State Health Director, Elders organized school-based health clinics and made contraception available to sexually active teen-agers -- over the ceaseless opposition of local religious conservatives. She was so effective that when Bill Clinton was elected President, she was one of his first appointees.

"I don't set policy and I don't control the money," Elders said on a recent icy afternoon in Washington. "But I can use my bully pulpit to get discussion going." In office barely five months (she was confirmed in September), she already has accomplished that. In December, Elders remarked that drug legalization was worth studying -- an opinion that the White House immediately distanced itself from, but one that Elders reiterated in January. "Bill Clinton didn't pick me to be a rubber stamp for him," she says in her soft Southern voice. "If that was all he wanted, he would have left me in Arkansas." Q: When was the first time you met Bill Clinton? A: When he was running for Attorney General of the State of Arkansas, in the 70's. I can't say that we were buddies, but I had a lot of respect for him: he came from near my hometown. Then he became Governor, and my brother Bernard was murdered; my family didn't expect him, but he just showed up at the funeral. It meant a lot to me. It meant a great deal to my parents. We were all very impressed that a Governor of Arkansas would do that. Q: Your brother was murdered? A: My brother knew someone, a man who I think had some very serious mental illness and had a very significant crush on my brother's wife. This man sent bullets to my brother and his wife, labeled with my brother's name. And then he broke into their house and . . . killed him. Q: How do the survivors of such a tragedy deal with it? A: You just . . . go on. I know [ the authorities ] wanted to know what should be done about it. But my brother was always so kind, and we felt strongly that he would never want anybody put to death. Never! Q: So you differ with President Clinton in his support of the death penalty? A: As a Christian, as an individual, as a doctor, I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty. That experience certainly gave me a lot of feeling for the families of crime victims, but also for the family of the person who committed the crime. I knew this man's family, and I know how painful it was to them. I feel that we, as a society, failed this person. Because he obviously had lots of emotional problems. Q: You grew up near Bill Clinton's hometown? A: In Schaal, Ark. That's about 30 miles from Hope. My family chopped cotton, trapped raccoons. We were poor. Q: When you were growing up, what did you want to be? A: A laboratory technician. That was the only thing I'd ever heard about. You can't be what you don't see. I didn't think about being a doctor. I didn't even think about being a clerk in a store -- I'd never seen a black clerk in a clothing store.

I was able to go to Philander Smith College in Little Rock when I was 15 only because the United Methodist Church offered me a scholarship. My seven sisters and brothers picked cotton to help me get clothing and the $3.38 bus fare. And I'll never forget: my young brother, who is now a minister, had picked cotton all day, and when it got late, I remember him looking up and asking, "Do we have enough yet?" Q: What made you decide on a medical career? A: Well, at Philander Smith College, I met Dr. Edith Irby Jones, [ the first black woman to study at the University of Arkansas Medical School ] and I was totally impressed with her. She talked about taking the "high road" and being the best one could possibly be. I wanted to be just like her. Making that happen wasn't easy. I first went into the Army, where I was trained as a physical therapist. Eventually, I used the G.I. Bill to go to medical school. Q: You studied at the University of Arkansas Medical School in the late 1950's, when the civil rights movement was shaking the South. Did you feel any desire to be an activist? A: No. I was so consumed with being a medical student -- and it was very hard to be -- that I didn't have time for a social conscience. I'd like to say I was more noble than that, but I wasn't. All I thought about was getting myself through. I didn't worry that I couldn't eat in the dining room with the white students. I didn't worry that there were places that white students could go to for graduation parties that I couldn't. I didn't worry that people who came to the hospital made comments to me that amounted to "What are you doing here?" Once, I had a professor say to me, "You know you have as much education as a lot of white people." I answered, "Doctor, I have more education than most white people." Q: Dr. Everett Koop once said that his confirmation for Surgeon General was one of the worst single experiences of his life. Was that true for you, too? A: Yes. The confirmation process had very little to do with what kind of Surgeon General I would be. I felt it was more a mechanism to try to destroy me than anything else. Had I not decided that I was not going to let other people keep me from doing what I felt was important, I would have dropped out. But I was not going to let other people make that decision for me. They might win, but that there was no way, no way they were going to do it without a battle. [ Laughs ] When it was all over I remember thinking, "I came to Washington, D.C., like prime steak and after being here a while, I feel like poor-grade hamburger." Q: During your confirmation, Senator John Danforth, who introduced Justice Clarence Thomas's nomination for the Supreme Court to the Senate, described you as "unimpressive and foolish." Was this sexism? A: Probably. If Senator Danforth felt that I was "unimpressive and foolish," he obviously had a wonderful array of very "impressive," very "sensible" people out there. I don't know them. I hope he does.

You know, some people in the American Medical Association, a certain group of them, didn't even know that I was a physician. And they were passing a resolution to say that from now on every Surgeon General must be a physician -- which was a knock at me. Well, you know, not only am I a physician, I'm a pediatrician. Not only am I a pediatrician, I'm a pediatric endocrinologist. Not only am I a pediatric endocrinologist, but I was a professor at a major university medical school! They don't expect a black female to have accomplished what I have accomplished and to have done the things that I have. Q: What did you feel watching the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas? A: I very much believed and supported Anita Hill. Because what Thomas said was not atypical of some educated black males. They tend to want to move away from being black and associate themselves with the white power structure. They tend to put down black women. . . . Judge Thomas was a man who had used the system to get where he wanted to be, but then felt that everyone else should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Q: And the charge of sexual harassment?

A: I absolutely believed Anita Hill. I think she took an awful lot of denigration and suffering. . . . But then, black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed -- by anyone. Q: Former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm has often said that she felt more oppressed as a woman than as a black. Is that true of you? A: No. I feel that I am who I am because I'm a black female. For instance, when I was health director in Arkansas, I was able to say lots of things to make a difference for black young people only because I was a black female. I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it -- only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did. Q: Let's talk about what you said. You traveled Arkansas declaring loudly and clearly that you considered teen pregnancy another form of slavery. What did you mean by that? A: What I meant was, if you're poor and ignorant, with a child, you're a slave. Meaning that you're never going to get out of it. These women are in bondage to a kind of slavery that the 13th Amendment just didn't deal with. The old master provided food, clothing and health care to the slaves because he wanted them to get up and go to work in the morning. And so on welfare: you get food, clothing and shelter -- you get survival, but you can't really do anything else. You can't control your life. Q: Do you think there's something in our culture that makes it hard for society to deal with issues of sex and reproduction? A: I don't know about that. But I think we have tried to impose our moral standards on everybody else when many times they are not what we live by. When it comes to issues of sex and birth control, there's a lot of hypocrisy. For instance, there are many people out there absolutely opposing contraceptives, but who let their daughters take birth control pills to "regulate" their periods.