Joan Clemmons, MD

In 1966, Joan E. Clemmons, MD, became the first African American woman to earn her medical degree from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Clemmons succeeded luminaries like Susan Maria McKinney Steward, MD, who (in 1870) was the first African American woman in New York State to earn a medical degree, and Lydia T. Wright, MD, who became Buffalo’s first African American pediatrician in 1952.

Clemmons’ psychiatric internship was conducted at Buffalo State Hospital.

She is from Uniondale, New York.