Charles Drew

Early life and training

Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, D.C., on 3 June 1904 and attended Dunbar High School. He went to Amherst College on an athletic scholarship, graduating in 1926, then taught and coached at Morgan College in Baltimore to save for medical school.

Howard turned down his application and Harvard deferred him, so he trained at McGill University in Montreal, graduating second in his class in 1933. After a residency at Montreal General Hospital he joined the Howard University medical faculty in 1935.

Blood banking research

On a Rockefeller Fellowship from 1938, Drew trained in surgery under Allen O. Whipple at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Working with John Scudder, he set up an experimental blood bank there in 1939 and studied how to collect, process and store blood and plasma. The work became his dissertation, Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation, and in 1940 he became the first African American to earn a doctorate in medical science at Columbia.

Blood for Britain and the Red Cross

In 1940, as German bombing struck Britain, Drew became medical director of the Blood for Britain project. He standardised collection and plasma processing, and the programme gathered more than 14,500 donations and shipped about 5,000 litres of plasma before it ended in January 1941.

He then helped launch a national blood bank run by the American Red Cross and the National Research Council, introducing mobile collection units later called bloodmobiles. Sources describe his title differently, as director or assistant director. The armed forces at first barred blood from Black donors; when the Red Cross later accepted it, the blood had to be kept and labelled separately by race. Drew called this policy unscientific and insulting. He left the programme in April 1941; the National Archives and Arizona State University's Embryo Project describe it as a resignation in protest, while the National WWII Museum notes he made no public statement at the time.

Teacher and surgeon

From 1941 Drew chaired Howard's Department of Surgery and was chief surgeon at Freedmen's Hospital, training a generation of Black surgeons. He was among the first African American examiners for the American Board of Surgery and campaigned against the exclusion of Black physicians from medical societies. The NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1944.

Death and a persistent myth

On 1 April 1950, Drew died after a car crash near Burlington, North Carolina, while driving to a medical conference at Tuskegee. He was 45. A story soon spread that a whites-only hospital refused to treat him or give him a transfusion. Historians have repeatedly rejected this: the National Library of Medicine and the National Archives state he was treated, including with a transfusion, but his injuries were too severe to survive.