Dr. Charles Drew

Dr. Charles Drew (1904-1950), scientist. Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington D.C., the son of a school teacher, and was a four-sport star athlete in high school. He won a partial football scholarship to Amherst University in 1922 but also had to wait tables to pay his tuition. Excelling at both athletics and academics, he earned the team MVP award his senior year, ran track, earned a perfect score on his senior chemistry exam, and became a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. After graduation he worked as athletic director, football coach and science professor at Morgan State University for several years to save money for medical school. He attended McGill University in Montreal, then did his internship and residency at several Montreal hospitals and at Howard University, which awarded him a fellowship to complete an additional doctoral degree at Columbia University. In his 1941 dissertation thesis “Banked Blood,” Drew showed that it was possible to separate blood into its components of red blood cells and blood plasma, which could be stored longer and kept safe from contamination. For decades transfusions had been done by quickly transferring blood between two individuals, since the blood coagulated almost immediately after leaving the human body, but thanks to Drew’s research it could now be kept in blood banks. This saved thousands of lives in World War II because blood plasma could be taken to wounded soldiers on the front lines, preventing them from dying of blood loss.

Drew was appointed the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, where he oversaw the collection and shipment of thousands of liters of blood plasma to the European battlefront in refrigerated “Bloodmobiles” under the Blood for Britain project. He left the Red Cross after only nine months in protest of racist policies, though, after the U.S. military rejected donations from African Americans and insisted that “black blood” and “white blood” be stored separately, even though there was no scientific basis for this and many wounded soldiers died while waiting for “same race blood.” He returned to Howard University as chair of the Department of Surgery, writing numerous articles for scientific journals, becoming a Fellow in the International College of Surgeons and the first black examiner on the American Board of Surgery, and being awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal. In 1950 he was driving near Burlington, North Carolina when his car rolled over, causing fatal internal injuries. An old rumor holds that local white doctors refused to treat him because of his race and that he bled to death on the way to a black hospital, but the other black physicians who were riding with him testified that the white doctors did their best and his injuries were too severe to be healed under any circumstances. Even so, this myth revealed the truth of a hypocritical society that treated blacks as second-class citizens while benefiting from their genius, and to the present day some blood banks around the world refuse donations from people of African descent on the assumption that their blood is “contaminated.” The American Red Cross headquarters and numerous other facilities have been named in Drew’s honor, including the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, and millions of lives have been saved around the world through his research.

©David Brodnax, Sr.