With Dr. Regina Benjamin, POTUS Makes Good On Diversity Promise
President Barack Obama has selected Dr. Regina Benjamin, an Alabama family physician, as the U.S. surgeon general. Obama is to announce Benjamin as the top authority on U.S. medical matters at a Rose Garden ceremony today.
A graduate of Xavier and the Morehouse School of Medicine, expect this dynamic African American woman to be in the news on a regular basis given the pervasiveness of the global Swine Flu epidemic. She would be the second black woman to hold the post behind Dr. Jocelyn Elders, appointed by President Bill Clinton, who created controversy for her blunt and candid conversations about sex.
A biography of her by the MacArthur Foundation said Benjamin is a "rural family physician forging an inspiring model of compassionate and effective medical care in one of the most underserved regions of the United States."
It said that in 1990, she founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic to serve the Gulf Coast fishing community of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a village of approximately 2,500 people devastated twice in the past decade by Hurricanes Georges, in 1998, and Katrina, in 2005.