Samuel Ulysses Rodgers, M.D., MPH

'Dual dynamos’ Samuel U. Rodgers, Mamie Hughes build legacy of improving community

By Tovah Redwood Special to The Star

The Kansas City Star. Thursday, January 22, 1998

“All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing,” says Mamie Hughes, left. Those are words that inspire her and her husband, Samuel U. Rodgers, with their own local activism. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/The Star)

Some people's lives can be measured in noteworthy achievements. Some people's lives can be measured in service to others. A very few lives can be measured in both.

For the husband-wife team of Samuel U. Rodgers and Mamie Hughes, service to others is their most  important noteworthy achievement - or would be, if they'd seek the attention they deserve.

Instead, the two have spent decades doing the hard work behind the scenes that makes a community healthier, more civil, and more just.

Just ask Mayor Emanuel Cleaver. "They are dual dynamos," he says, "who have altered the landscape of Kansas City and who have done much good."

That's high praise from a man Hughes hasn't hesitated to pressure in her current job for the city as the advocate for the residents affected by the construction of the Bruce R. Watkins Roadway. She sometimes tells irate callers, "The buck does not stop here. You all call the mayor. When the mayor tells you to call Mamie, you tell him you've talked to Mamie, and, in fact, she told you to call."

She showed that kind of determination when she first started the job. Unable to dig up the names of people whose homes were slated for demolition, she and her son drove the length of the proposed roadway from Bannister Road to downtown and compiled the list themselves. Then she went to block clubs and churches to convince residents that she was there to help navigate the local, state and federal bureaucracies involved.

“The way I do it is believing that it can be done,” she says. “And I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

Neither did her husband when he came up against the harsh reality of unequal training for black and white medical students in the 1930s and ‘40s. At the time, black students were admitted only to Howard University in Washington or Maharrie Medical College in Nashville, Tenn. Training in medical specialty was unavailable to them.

Once back in Kansas City after serving in Italy in World War II and Being awarded a combat medical badge, he couldn’t advance beyond the level of general practitioner. He and some white doctors, who returned from the war furious to find that their jobs had been filled, worked together to set up a system to train black physicians at the then-segregated city hospital.

“We set up what turned out to be a fine training system that produced black surgeons at a time when they could not have gotten any training any place else in the country….The argument is the right to have the opportunity to become what you are capable of becoming.”

He is still passionate about justice in education and training. One recent afternoon at their Dunbar neighborhood home, Rodgers waved a copy of the American Medical Association journal in outrage. Half a century after his own struggle, decades after he and Charles Drew and other black medical pioneers won such hard-fought gains, an article discussed the enduring challenge of training more minority physicians.

Rodgers was the fifth black-certified obstetrician/gynecologist in the country, and the first black examiner for the ob/gyn medical board. He and some local colleagues also founded the first black group medical practice in the United States. After 30 years as executive director of the Kansas City health clinic that bears his name, Rodgers recently became executive director emeritus.

He shows no signs of slowing down. Asked about the state of health care in the Unites States, Rodgers offers a history lesson on the plight of poor people and on the rise of managed care – all before racing out the door to a meeting.

“The problems that were existent 20 years ago are still there,” he said, not only in training of minority physicians but in the charts of his patients. “Health problems for black people and poor people remain essentially the same…infant death rates, how long people live, what diseases they die from – it’s the same that it was 25 years ago.”

Rodgers’ concern for the poor and the disenfranchised began when he was a child in Anniston, Ala., where his father was a doctor. “All I’d ever heard of was poor people and sick people. The notion that everybody needs (health care) was no problem.”

Hughes has dedicated her life to helping others too. She is a founder or member of several organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, the Panel of American Women that offered dialogues on diversity training, the NAACP, and the Central Exchange. Like Rodgers, the list of her awards and affiliations goes on for pages.

Kansas City residents know her from her community work and from her tenure in the Jackson County Legislature. She also has taught school in Kansas City and in Arcola, Miss. She was regional director of ACTION, the federal agency coordinating community volunteers, and headed the Black Economic Union in the mid-1980s.

The theme that runs through her decades of accomplishments is bridge building – across race, religion, gender, age, and economic status.

“This can be a good world because people acknowledge that we are different in many different ways, but there are a lot of things about us that are similar,” she says.

Like Rodgers, Hughes shares stories of discrimination throughout her life. Going to the back of the bus. Hearing her children ask what “colored water” at a fountain is, and explaining that “it’s just like the white water, except it’s going to be cold.” Finding segregated rooms when she went to deliver her daughter at a supposedly integrated hospital.

But like Rodgers, who joined with white doctors to further training for blacks, Hughes believes in building coalitions for the common good. “There is black racism, there is white racism, and to me there is no excuse for either….Each of us thinks that what happens to us is terrible, and it is, but very often the thing we react negatively to, we inflict on someone else.”

While racism remains an ugly reality, she says the bigger threat may be silence. “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.”

Hughes shows respect for others and expects it in return. A talented mimic, she transforms herself into a sixteen-year-old boy, chomping gum and slouching in his seat in a high school auditorium. Along with his buddies, he was ignoring her, Cleaver, and the school principal in an assembly, She got off the stage, roamed through the audience, and insisted that they pay attention. Her background as a teacher is obvious – she speaks slowly and deliberately, sets high standards, and offers help in reaching them.

Hughes has spent her life marshalling good people to join her in the fight for justice. Rodgers has spent his life in the fight to train himself and others to care for people in need. Neither one ever gave up.

“I’m going to keep on believing,” Hughes says. “There’s just so much to be gained.”

Community Star

The Kansas City Star. Friday, August 28, 1998

Dr. Samuel U. Rodgers says he used to hear his father, a physician in Alabama, complain about people who never paid their bills. But he doesn’t recall him turning down anyone who needed health care.

Rodgers, who recently turned 81 and who directed the Samuel U. Rodgers Health Care Center at 825 Euclid for more that 25 years, now says the same thing about himself: “I’ve never turned anybody down coming into this place.”

Although his business card calls him the center’s “Executive Director Emeritus,” Rodgers continues to come to his office nearly every day and help oversee the health care of thousands of patients. His long commitment to high-quality health care for the indigent makes him an obvious choice for recognition as a Community Star.

It has been an arduous journey from Anniston, Ala., to the twilight of a magnificent medical career in Kansas City. And Rodgers, who has been battling prostate cancer for 12 years, laughs when he says he’s “surprised to be alive and surprised that I don’t hurt.” Indeed, when he goes for treatments at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, he says, other doctors gather around him to see how he’s survived.

Despite his own health problems, Rodgers has not lost sight of what initially drove him to medical work: what he calls the sense of “obligation” to help poor people have good medical care.

Sometimes he has felt like a lonely voice speaking on behalf of often-ignored people. He’s distressed, for instance, that although effective treatments for high blood pressure have been around for decades, the mortality rate among African-American men with this disease is so high it’s “ridiculous.”

“It’s a critical comment on society’s interest in certain people,” he says. “It raises the question of who gives a damn. It’s just terrifying, this idea that a society as intelligent and knowledgeable as we are can’t even handle a simple disease like hypertension.”

For decades Rodgers has been a strong voice for decent health care for everyone. A graduate of Talladega College in Alabama and the Howard University medical school, he interned at Kansas City’s old General Hospital No. 2, and later became the first black physician at Research Medical Center.

In 1967 he gave up his group practice to become executive director of the Wayne Miner Health Center, which was later renamed for him.

In recent years he has received many honors, including the 1996 VIP award of the Centurions of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the reStart Liberation Award, and the 1997 Advocacy Award from the National Association of Community Health Centers. His activist wife, Mamie Hughes, a former member of the Jackson County Legislature, has long shared his dedication to helping others.

Still, he worries that the nation’s commitment to good health care for poor people – first displayed in the 1960s War on Poverty – has waned.

“Poor people are back where they were before – or worse than they were before,” he says.

But as long as Samuel U. Rodgers has a voice, he will speak out for people who need help.