Charles Richard Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904 in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. His father, Richard Drew, was the only Black member of the carpet-layers' union in the District. His mother, Nora Burrell Drew, had graduated from Howard's teacher-training program. The family lived on 20th Street, a few blocks from the White House. Charles was the oldest of five. A younger sister, Elsie, died of tuberculosis when Charles was a teenager. He later said the death pointed him toward medicine.

At Dunbar High School, then the leading Black college-preparatory high school in the country, he played football, baseball, basketball, and ran track. In 1922 he won the James E. Walker Memorial Medal as the school's best all-around athlete. Amherst College offered him a scholarship. He arrived in Massachusetts as one of thirteen Black students on a campus of about six hundred. He earned twelve varsity letters, led the football team his senior year, graduated in 1926, and began looking for a medical school that would take him.

No medical school in the United States would admit him on a scholarship he could afford. He taught biology and chemistry and coached football at Morgan College in Baltimore for five years, saving tuition. In 1928 he was admitted to McGill University Medical School in Montreal. He finished second in his class, won the annual prize in neuroanatomy, and earned both the MD and a Master of Surgery degree by 1933.

He returned to Howard University as a faculty instructor in pathology in 1935. A year later the Rockefeller Foundation sent him to Columbia University on a two-year fellowship to pursue a Doctor of Medical Science degree. At Columbia he joined the laboratory of Dr. John Scudder, who was studying the problem of blood storage. Whole blood in 1938 could be kept for roughly a week before it broke down. Surgeons needed it in volume and on demand. Scudder, Drew, and a small team began to separate the liquid plasma from the red cells. Plasma, they found, could be preserved for much longer, dried, reconstituted, and transfused without blood-type matching.

Drew's 1940 doctoral dissertation, Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation, laid out the method. It became the scientific blueprint for the large-scale blood bank. He was the first Black American to earn the Doctor of Medical Science degree from Columbia, a distinction that carried no plaque and brought him no appointment at any of the white-run New York hospitals where he had done the research. Columbia awarded the degree. The American Board of Surgery, the specialty board that certified surgeons in the United States, refused for years to recognize his surgical training on grounds that carried no stated reason.

In the summer of 1940, with France already fallen to Germany, British blood transfusion services began to run short. The Blood Transfusion Association in New York proposed a joint program, Blood for Britain, to ship American plasma across the Atlantic. John Scudder recommended Drew as medical supervisor. Drew took the program from a few scattered hospitals into a national operation. Between August 1940 and January 1941, Blood for Britain collected plasma from roughly 14,000 donors and shipped approximately 5,500 liters across the Atlantic. No recipient developed a bacterial contamination traceable to the American supply. Drew worked out the processing, drying, and quality-control protocols himself, most of them unchanged in substance today.

In February 1941, with the United States still a year from entering the war, the American Red Cross and the National Research Council launched a national blood-donor service modeled on Blood for Britain. They named Drew the first assistant director and effectively the medical director. Within months the U.S. military asked the Red Cross to separate donated blood by the race of the donor. Drew had shown in his Columbia dissertation that there was no meaningful biological difference in the plasma of Black and white donors. He said so. The policy stood. In the spring of 1941 he resigned from the Red Cross blood-bank program and returned to Howard University in Washington.

At Howard he took up the chair of surgery at thirty-seven, the youngest department chair in the university's history. He spent the rest of his career there. He trained the next generation of Black American surgeons, most of them excluded from residency positions in white-run hospitals. He was strict. He required his residents to read both the current journal literature and the surgical classics of the previous century. He set a bar for the surgical section of the American Board of Surgery examination and drilled his residents on it until they passed. Under his chairmanship, more than half of the Black board-certified surgeons in the United States came through Howard.

In 1944 the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal for his contribution to medicine and to the Allied war effort. He continued to press, in public speeches and in medical journals, for the desegregation of the American Red Cross blood supply and for the admission of Black physicians to the American Medical Association, which excluded them through its state and county chapters.

On the night of March 31 and early morning of April 1, 1950, Drew and three Howard colleagues were driving to Tuskegee for a free clinic and a scientific program. Drew was at the wheel. Near Haw River, North Carolina, on U.S. 49, the car went off the road and rolled. Drew was thrown and trapped under the vehicle with severe injuries. He was taken to Alamance General Hospital in Burlington, where white physicians did everything available to save him. He died at 8:10 a.m. on April 1, 1950, at the age of 45. The three colleagues in the car with him survived.

A persistent story circulated in the years that followed: that Drew had died because a segregated Southern hospital had refused to transfuse him. The story is untrue. His colleagues at the scene, John Ford, Samuel Bullock, and Walter Johnson, stated that Alamance General admitted Drew immediately, transfused him, and worked on him until he died. The false account endured partly because it matched, in reverse, what Drew had resigned over. He had built a system that saved lives on the battlefield and had refused to let it be segregated. That was the truth of his work. The legend was symptom rather than fact.

He left behind his wife, Minnie Lenore Robbins Drew, a teacher at Spelman College, and four children: Bebe, Charlene, Rhea, and Charles Jr. The plasma protocols he had designed went on preserving blood through the rest of the war and into peace. In 1966 the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science opened in South Los Angeles. His papers sit in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. Every major blood bank in the world still operates on the core of his method.