Charles Drew

His father laid carpet and his mother had trained as a teacher, and the family lived in Foggy Bottom when that stretch of Washington was still mixed and middle class. As a boy he delivered more than a thousand newspapers a day. Dunbar High School, which drew the city's best Black students and teachers, sent him out in 1922 with an athletics scholarship to Amherst, where he ran track and played football and graduated in 1926. Money was the obstacle to medicine, so he spent two years at Morgan College teaching chemistry and biology and serving as its first athletic director. Then McGill, where he finished second in a class of 127 and took his medical and surgical degrees in 1933.

A Rockefeller fellowship put him at Columbia in 1938, working under John Scudder on the problem of shock. Whole blood spoiled in days. Drew showed that plasma, separated from the cells and dried, kept months longer and could be reconstituted where it was needed, and the thesis that proved it, Banked Blood, earned him a Doctor of Science in Medicine in 1940 — the first African American to take that degree at Columbia. He was made medical director of Blood for Britain, built a central collection point, tested every unit and let only trained hands touch plasma. In five months nearly 15,000 people gave, and more than 5,500 vials crossed the Atlantic. In February 1941 he took over the first American Red Cross blood bank and devised the refrigerated collection trucks that became bloodmobiles.

The Army and the Navy first refused blood from Black donors outright, then agreed to take it if it were stored apart from white blood. There was no scientific basis for the rule and Drew, who had built the system and was the most prominent Black man in the field, said so. He resigned in 1942. The Red Cross kept the policy until 1950, the year he died. The exclusion followed him in smaller ways too: the District of Columbia chapter of the American Medical Association admitted only white physicians, and he was never a member of the AMA. He went back to Howard and Freedmen's Hospital as chief of surgery and spent the rest of his life training Black surgeons, because almost nobody else would.

On April 1, 1950 he was driving three Black colleagues to the free clinic at Tuskegee, still tired from a night in the operating theater, when he lost the car near Burlington, North Carolina. It somersaulted three times. The others were barely hurt. Drew was pinned, his foot jammed under the brake pedal, and was pronounced dead at Alamance General Hospital half an hour after treatment began. The story that a whites-only hospital turned him away and let him bleed out spread anyway, into an episode of M*A*S*H and Philip Roth's The Human Stain. John Ford, a passenger, said nothing could have saved him and a transfusion might have killed him faster. The myth held because such refusals were ordinary.

Charles Drew's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Banked Blood: A Study on Blood Preservation book
  The Columbia thesis that established plasma storage 1940
• Blood for Britain mission
  Nearly 15,000 donors and over 5,500 vials of plasma in five months 1940
• First American Red Cross Blood Bank company
  He directed it from February 1941 and resigned the following year 1941
• The bloodmobile invention
  Refrigerated mobile collection stations that took donation to the donor 1941
• Howard University surgical training program other
  As chief of surgery at Howard and Freedmen's Hospital 1942

• 1922 aged ~18 Graduates from Dunbar High School in Washington
• 1926 aged ~22 Graduates from Amherst on an athletics scholarship He then taught at Morgan College for two years to pay for medical school.
• 1933 aged ~29 Takes his medical and surgical degrees at McGill, second in a class of 127
• 1938 aged ~34 Goes to Columbia on a Rockefeller fellowship in surgery
• 1939 aged ~35 Marries Minnie Lenore Robbins of Spelman College They had three daughters and a son.
• 1940 aged ~36 Earns the Doctor of Science in Medicine and runs Blood for Britain
• February 1941 aged 36 Becomes director of the first American Red Cross blood bank
• 1942 aged ~38 Resigns over the segregation of donated blood The Red Cross kept the policy until 1950.
• April 1, 1950 aged 45 Dies after a car crash on the way to the Tuskegee clinic Three colleagues in the car were barely injured.

• Clara Barton 1821–1912
  Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross and pioneered disaster relief in America. founded the Red Cross he later served
• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. founded the institute he was driving to
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. repeated the myth about his death in fiction
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. fought the same color line in the courts
• Mary McLeod Bethune 1875–1955
  Educator and civil rights leader who founded Bethune-Cookman University and advised four presidents. contemporary in Black institution building