A vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, she was the second woman, second person of color, and first African American to serve as Surgeon General.

Elders is known for her frank discussion of her views on controversial issues such as drug legalization, masturbation, and distributing contraception in schools.

Elders was born Minnie Lee Jones in Schaal, Arkansas,[2] to a poor, farm sharecropping family, and was the eldest of eight children, and valedictorian of her school class.

degree in Biology from Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she also pledged Delta Sigma Theta.

After working as a nurse's aide in a Veterans Administration hospital in Milwaukee for a period, she joined the United States Army in May 1953 and became a second lieutenant.

In 1987, then-governor Bill Clinton appointed Elders as Director of the Arkansas Department of Health, making her the first African-American woman in the state to hold this position.

Some of her major accomplishments while in office include reducing the teen pregnancy rate by increasing the availability of birth control, counseling, and sex education at school-based clinics; a tenfold increase in early childhood screenings from 1988 to 1992 and a 24 percent rise in the immunization rate for two-year-olds; and an expansion of the availability of HIV testing and counseling services, breast cancer screenings, and better hospice care for the elderly.

She also worked hard to promote the importance of sex education, proper hygiene, and prevention of substance abuse in public schools.

Poor African-American teenage mothers are "captive to a slavery the 13th Amendment did not anticipate,"[7] which is a major reason why she stressed the importance of teaching sex education in public schools.

"[9] Elders has received a National Institutes of Health career development award, also serving as assistant professor in pediatrics at the University of Arkansas Medical Center from 1967.

Her research interests focused on endocrinology, and she received board certification as a pediatric endocrinologist in 1978, becoming the first person in the state of Arkansas to do so.

In January 1993, Bill Clinton appointed her as the United States Surgeon General, making her the first African American and the second woman (following Antonia Novello) to hold the position.

[1] Elders drew fire, as well as censure from the Clinton administration, when she suggested that legalizing drugs might help reduce crime and that the idea should be studied.

On December 15, 1993, around one week after making these comments, charges were filed against her son Kevin for selling cocaine in an incident involving undercover officers four months prior.

[1][16][17] This led sex-positive retailer Good Vibrations in 1995 to proclaim May 28 as National Masturbation Day in honor of Elders' advocacy.

during the episode on abstinence, where she says that she considers abstinence-only programs to be child abuse and discusses her opinions on teenage sex education, masturbation and contraceptives.