Trendsetter started out as teacher
Black nurse became director of school of nursing
Jessie Clemmons wanted to be a nurse, but she needed to teach before she could learn how to do that.
She reached her goal — and beyond — and worked for 40 years at the Jefferson Regional Medical Center School of Nursing in Pine Bluff.
“I was the first Black director of that school of nursing,” says Clemmons, 86, who retired in 2006. “As a matter of fact, I helped open up that nursing program, and I taught at it for five or six years and then I became director of the program. I graduated nurses that are working all over the United States and some even in foreign countries and in practically every hospital in Arkansas.”
Clemmons’ mother was a nurse and her grandmother was a schoolteacher.
“When I finished high school there was not a nursing program in Pine Bluff and I could not go out of state or even to another city,” Clemmons says. “I could not afford to go away to anywhere else to be a nurse.”
Her favorite subject in school was science.
“I enjoyed the biology classes. We dissected animals and studied their parts and how all the parts functioned and I enjoyed that part of it,” she says. “My grandmother being a teacher and my mom being a nurse didn’t seem to have much impact on me, but I don’t know. It probably had more than I realized.”
Clemmons graduated from high school in 1955, and from college in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in biology.
She taught science classes in high school in Marianna and Pine Bluff schools for five years while saving money for nursing school.
“My goal was set. I tried teaching, for five years, and I thought I might be able to convince myself that that’s what I was wanting to do,” she says. “But I was never satisfied with teaching.”
After five years of teaching, she went to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, and then worked as a nurse for five years.
“I enjoyed working as a nurse and taking care of sick people,” she says. “That was my goal, to become a nurse. But there was a severe shortage of nurses in Arkansas and in the United States. The Jefferson hospital where I worked, they got big in recruiting foreign nurses.”
People coming to Arkansas from other countries had their expenses for nurse’s training covered but often moved elsewhere after their obligated work periods were done.
“They would leave and not renew their contracts, and go to big cities because there wasn’t much in Pine Bluff,” Clemmons says. “Over a period of years, the hospital got smarter and said, ‘We can’t continue to do this. We need to start our own nursing school and grow our own nurses and educate those who have commitments, who live here in Arkansas and these surrounding small towns and train them because they are going to be here. This is their home.’”
The change afforded Clemmons a chance for advancement.
“I had been teaching already, and then I became a
registered nurse and then I was in the right place at the right time so when they said, ‘Will you teach now in the RN program,’ I said I would,’” she says.
Clemmons worked full time as she went back to school for a master’s degree so she would be qualified to teach nursing students. These students were more mature — and often more motivated —than the high school students she had taught before, and she enjoyed the work.
“As soon as I finished my master’s then the position for the director of the school came open and they offered me that position. I never planned to be the director of a school of nursing,” she says. “I never asked for that position. I didn’t apply for it. But I have to tell you that my life was guided by God. I was at the right place at the right time again and they asked me to do that.”
Clemmons and her husband, William, adopted a daughter around the time she became director of the nursing school. Her daughter and 17-year-old granddaughter moved in with her in Pine Bluff after William died in 2009.
Clemmons walks three miles every weekday morning.
“I’m an outside person,” she says. “I like raising flowers and raising gardens.”
Until the beginning of the covid pandemic, she was a frequent substitute teacher in Pine Bluff schools. She volunteers each week with the Women’s Hope Center in Pine Bluff, helping women with free pregnancy tests and free ultrasounds. And she volunteers with the youth department at her church, St. Bethel Baptist in Pine Bluff.
Over the years, Clemmons encouraged many of the students she interviewed for nursing school.
“I always tell them, ‘If you don’t enjoy working with people of all nationalities and all different cultures, then you go work with machines and computers and things like that,’” she says.
“I had gotten what I wanted, accomplished my goal of becoming a nurse, and then my philosophy was, ‘Now, Jessie, you go back and teach those who want to become nurses. Go back and help them.’”
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