Before World War II, during, and for some time after, Columbia, Missouri – often referred to as Little Dixie – was strictly divided by race. It has been said that if four Black people were standing together on the street corner, it would have been considered unlawful assembly. Denied access to hospitals, the Black community was relegated to home births. However, there were three Black community pillars they could call their own: St. Paul AME church, Sharp Edge business district, and Douglass School.  

Jim (“Grand Dad”) Nunnelly was born in 1941 during the middle of WWII. His mother, Geraldine, had three children by the time she was 19. Nunnelly, her fourth child, came along while she was in her 20s. Her wit and sheer intelligence would make an indelible mark on his life and successful career.

Nunnelly’s mother introduced him to poetry and taught him how to recite it. As early as 7 years old, he remembers being led to downtown Columbia to the corner of 8th and Broadway. He’d recite poetry that ultimately parlayed into donations by passersby, donations that funded the family’s Christmas. “She made me understand the difference between ‘living in’ and ‘living around’ an issue,” he said.

Fighting when there’s no fighting

As the last segregated graduating class of Douglass High School, he took the Ohio Psychological Test, akin to today’s ACT, and scored in the 99th percentile. “They made me take the test over again because they didn’t believe that the high school could produce someone so competitive,” he said. “The next time I tested I had to take the test with my arms and legs out so I took the test in shorts. Now this seems so odd and out of place, but it was quite relevant because it was the abnormality against normality that was the issue. And so this was an opportunity to show or find out if there was something shady going on with me taking this test and scoring so high. I remember learning the word percentile, it means it’s not a percent but it’s a part of the normality. I scored better than 99% of all of the high school graduates in the state.”

After some time had passed, Nunnelly recalls asking his mother why she didn’t sue the state. “She had a very curt answer that will live with me forever, ‘Fighting when there’s no fighting is better than fighting when there is fighting,’. That was it. It just kind of stayed with me as a management tool–maybe there’s strategy in everything you do.”

Nunnelly was a freshman at the University of Missouri when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the 1960 Civil Rights Act into law, and when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon. With a full-ride scholarship, he was one of only 50 Black students on a campus with a student body of 17,000. “It was lonely,” he said. “It was also an opportunity to rollerskate in a buffalo herd.”

Nunnelly also witnessed, front row, as national racial unrest unfurled. What started as a desire to travel abroad to Japan through a program at MU segued into a sojourn to Selma, Alabama. While there, Nunnelly recalls seeing the attack of civil rights activist Unitarian minister James Reeb. Reeb went to Alabama as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to take part in the Selma to Montgomery March and subsequent protests. After eating dinner at an integrated restaurant in Selma with two other ministers, he was attacked by white racists with clubs, and eventually went into a coma and died two days later from his injuries. The four men charged with his murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.

“It was like these ceaseless introductions to the problems,” Nunnelly said. “There is delight in people who understand that tragedy has its value for moving the needle. We make the best progress, I feel, in a time of trouble.” Around that time, Samuel U. Rodgers, MD, MPH, opened the first federally-recognized health center in Missouri–only the fourth of its kind in the United States in 1968.

As for Nunnelly, he had finished his undergrad degree and went to work at a grocery store at the local A&P (Atlantic and Pacific), where racist policies for Black employees pushed him to find strategic ways to excel. “If it sounds like I’m indicting people I’m not,” he said. “It was okay with me because that was an opportunity for change. I had to work harder to prove myself to be better than I would have normally been in order to move the needle.”

But it was his work in admissions at MU’s medical school that would change the trajectory of his career, for that was where he met and was recruited by Dr. Samuel U. Rodgers, the first Black American board-certified OB/GYN in the Kansas City area, and founder of the Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center. As a result, Nunnelly landed smack dab in Kansas City’s worst area of town – where Sam Rodgers, known then as Wayne Miner Health Center, was situated. “I made it my business to know everybody a stone’s throw away from the Center,” he said.  This included Allie Gates who just opened a restaurant on 12th Street, Woodland School, and the nearby Osteopathic Hospital (formerly Wesley Hospital) on 11th and Harrison, among other community staples. 

At the time, the Wayne Miner area had 4 high rises. Nunnelly served with the housing authority which had plans to demolish the buildings. Knowing that he’d be a part of displacing those who lived in those buildings was difficult. “The day I arrived here, they threw someone off the 11th floor,” he said. “It seems troublesome but there’s opportunity in the trouble, in the horror. It’s like going to a movie and watching a horror movie. You’ve got to learn how to feel good about the person who got away, as opposed to bemoaning what actually happened.” 

Serving the community’s children was a huge part of the Wayne Miner operation, quite frankly it was the ethos. Pediatrics would play a pivotal role in the Center’s success. Nunnelly likened it to standing in the cold on 8th and Broadway, again, trying to cover Christmas when no one was even uptown.  “The hardest thing was getting doctors and others to work here,” he said. “It was like asking people to work in a coal mine so to speak. It wasn’t very pretty. There was no prestige driving down here every day.”

The assumption was that the community surrounding the Center would make it nearly impossible to effectively address social drivers of health. It was right in the middle of the projects, the worst area of town, where they stopped taking crime statistics because it was so high and embarrassing. “They just stopped counting all the drug deals and murders that went on,” Nunnelly said. “It wasn’t expected that this place would excel because every odd was against you. Part of the growth and development of this operation was based on the people in the projects. That seems crazy because those were the same people who killed and threw people off the 11th-story high rise. But part of progress is [not] letting anyone know you are working on change.” 

Perpetuating the abnormal

It’s safe to say another part of progress is finding unconventional ways to motivate people to give their best. For Nunnelly, this meant meeting with every prospective Center hire and asking probing questions about how to make improvements. “I’d asked, if I hired you, what would I be able to see when you left, how would I know that you’ve been here?” he said. “I ignored performance evaluations, and even the job description to some extent and asked what could I hold you accountable for when you leave? People came up with some very, very positive thoughts about how to run the place.”

Chris Stewart, a historian with the Missouri Primary Care Association, said that both Dr. Rodgers and Nunnelly wanted to make sure that people knew they could get care at the health center without worries on how to pay for it, but Nunnelly worked with the staff on outreach to promote preventive care. “He came up with creative ways to make sure children got their immunizations, creative ways to make sure folks with diabetes had what they needed to be optimally healthy,” she said. When I say creative, I mean he bought season tickets to the Chiefs as a way to motivate both community members and staff members to get preventive services. He focused tremendously on prevention.”

It worked, all of it. This included thinking out of the box to ensure Center providers always had plenty of supplies by opening the place at midnight to restock shelves. “It causes conflict when you run out of something while the Center is open,” Nunnelly said. “We turned the whole Center into a preparation effort. We didn’t wait for something to happen. We were prepared when it did.”

Around November and December, Nunnelly and other Center executives noticed that employee absenteeism increased. They had a management meeting and came up with what some would consider an abnormal solution. It was during the early 80s when the Cabbage Patch Doll craze was at its height. “We set up a payroll deduction plan so that employees could buy the Cabbage Patch Dolls right here on the spot.” It was a hit.

Nunnelly also leveraged a summer youth-based initiative called the Joy Program to help with the Center generating awareness. There were 50 children enrolled and they were asked to go to their neighborhoods and tell 10 people about Wayne Miner Health Center. It became a marketing tool. He also had the foresight to allow children to serve as interpreters for their family members who came to this country from foreign lands. Some of these children have grown to be influential leaders in health care.

In 1988, Wayne Miner Health Center became Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center after its founder. Sam Rodgers serves clients in 40 languages, has four clinic locations, is a NCQA certified medical home, has numerous awards and accreditations, is building a 40-room, 30,000-square-foot pediatric wing, recently opened the Propeller Building designed to intersect health care, community, and the arts, and is the first Federally Qualified Health Center in Missouri to offer a Nurse Practitioner Residency Program in Missouri – among so many other accomplishments. Although Dr. Rodgers’ visionary leadership is the impetus behind the Center’s success, Nunnelly played a huge role in setting the stage for what the Center is today – with his name a permanent fixture in the new Propeller Building, a part of Sam Rodgers’ Healthy Living Campus.

“The new Propeller Building is home to the Jim Nunnelly Community Room, a 3,000-square-foot space dedicated to educating the community on health care, relationships, mentoring, and other key components of a thriving society—a fitting tribute to Mr. Nunnelly’s legacy,” said Sam Rogers CEO Bob Theis. “Furthermore, this room will also host celebrations, encouraging more frequent communal joy and unity. We are grateful for his visionary leadership that has been a huge part of the ongoing success of Sam Rodgers.”

Well known in the Kansas City community for his health care advocacy, youth outreach, and mentoring, Nunnelly, a retired health care executive, was the founder and administrator of Jackson County COMBAT, a progressive anti-drug program that emphasized treatment over prison terms for drug use. For years, he was known as the host of Generation Rap, a Saturday morning youth program. Nunnelly is an activist, spreading information on diabetes and healthy living, and an inspiration to generations in Kansas City.

But there are many other things that Nunnelly did that may not be as widely known that also moved the needle. One was fighting to get a bus stop in an area of town that was considered deplorable. But that bus stop enabled community members access to jobs, stores, services, and a myriad of other things that improved their livelihoods. 

Nunnelly’s mother was instrumental in helping him develop a mindset that allowed him to out-think, maneuver, and strategize in plain sight yet undercover – with impeccable timing. 

“It’s tough to rollerskate in a buffalo herd,” he said. “You still have to move the needle. The only time people make progress is when company comes. That was our situation at Rodgers. We knew we were kind of experimental so you had to do things so well that it would have to be recognized in spite of the difficulty that was surrounding you.”

And they did.