Charles Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on the third of June 1904 in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, D.C., the eldest of five children of Richard Thomas Drew — a carpet-layer for the Moses Furniture Company and the financial secretary of the Carpet, Linoleum and Soft Tile Layers Union of Washington — and Nora Burrell Drew, a graduate of Howard Normal School and a homemaker. He completed Dunbar High School in 1922 as captain of the football, baseball, basketball and track teams and took the Walter Camp athletic scholarship to Amherst College, where he received the bachelor's in 1926.

He worked as biology instructor and director of athletics at Morgan College of Baltimore from 1926 to 1928 to save money for medical school and was admitted in September 1928 to the McGill University Faculty of Medicine at Montreal, the only Canadian medical school then admitting Black candidates. He completed the M.D. with the gold medal of the senior class in 1933 and the Master of Surgery in 1935. He served as resident in surgery at the Royal Victoria Hospital and at Montreal General before accepting in 1935 the appointment as instructor in pathology at Howard University Medical School.

In 1938 he took two years of leave from Howard for doctoral studies in surgery at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in New York, working with John Scudder on the problem of long-term blood-plasma preservation. His doctoral dissertation — Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation — established the protocols for plasma separation, centrifugation and refrigeration that would within two years be the foundational technology of the entire blood-banking industry. He defended the dissertation on the thirteenth of June 1940 — the first African American to receive a Doctor of Medical Science degree from Columbia.

In September 1940 he was appointed medical director of the Blood for Britain programme — the wartime US-to-UK plasma-supply operation organised by the Red Cross. The programme he designed and ran from September 1940 to January 1941 supplied fourteen and a half thousand units of plasma to the United Kingdom and developed the operational protocols subsequently used for all Allied military blood-banking through the Second World War.

He resigned from the American Red Cross blood programme in protest at the segregation of donor blood by race — a policy on which the War Department had insisted over Drew's professional objection. He returned to Howard as chief of surgery in March 1941 and remained there for the rest of his career. He was killed on the first of April 1950 in an automobile accident on Route 49 near Burlington, North Carolina, while driving with three colleagues to a clinical conference at Tuskegee. He was forty-five.

He is honored here as the founder of the American blood programme.