Charles R. Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on the third of June 1904 at Washington, D.C., the eldest of five children of Richard Thomas Drew — a Black carpet-layer who served the principal Washington, D.C. mass-transit-magnate households of the period — and Nora Burrell Drew, a public-school teacher. He was raised in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. and educated at the Dunbar High School at Washington.

He took the bachelor of arts at Amherst College in 1926 — captain of the football team and the principal track-and-field athlete of the Amherst class of 1926 — and was named at his Amherst graduation Amherst’s all-American halfback and the year’s most valuable track-and-field athlete.

He took employment between 1926 and 1928 at the Morgan State College at Baltimore as the athletic director and instructor of biology, and was admitted in 1928 to the McGill University Faculty of Medicine at Montreal on the recommendation of his Amherst mentor Dr. Otto Glaser. He completed the M.D., C.M. at McGill in 1933 — first in the class of 137 — and the principal McGill surgical-house officership at the Royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal from 1933 to 1935.

He was hired in 1935 by the Howard University College of Medicine at Washington, D.C. as instructor of pathology and rose by 1938 to assistant professor of surgery. He was admitted in 1938 to the General Education Board Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for further surgical study at the Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital at New York under the principal American surgical-research figure John Scudder.

He completed in 1940 at Columbia the doctoral dissertation Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation — the foundational doctoral monograph of the modern blood-bank system — under Dr. John Scudder and Dr. Allen Whipple. Drew was the first Black recipient of the doctor of science in medicine at Columbia and the first Black recipient of any doctoral degree in surgical research at any major American medical school.

He was appointed in September 1940 the medical supervisor of the Blood for Britain programme — the joint Plasma for Britain American-British wartime blood-supply programme operated from New York to support the British war effort across the second year of the European war. The programme operated under the Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital and provided over five thousand five hundred litres of dried plasma to the British forces between September 1940 and June 1941.

He was appointed in February 1941 the assistant director of the new American Red Cross blood-bank programme — the principal civilian-and-military blood-supply system of the United States Second World War effort, of which Drew was the principal architect. He resigned the Red Cross directorship in May 1941 in protest at the United States Army Surgeon General’s order of the close of April 1941 that segregated the Red Cross blood supplies by donor race — an order Drew publicly characterized as without scientific basis.

He returned to Howard University Medical College in 1941 as chair of the Department of Surgery and chief surgeon at the Freedmen’s Hospital at Washington, D.C., the positions he held for the remaining nine years of his life.

He died on the first of April 1950 of complications of a road-traffic injury at Burlington, North Carolina, en route to a Tuskegee Institute clinic, at forty-five.

He is honored here as the principal architect of the modern blood-bank system.