Dr. Charles Drew: The Father of the Blood Bank

Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, D.C., in 1904 and raised in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. He attended Amherst College on an athletic scholarship and graduated from McGill University Medical School in Montreal, where he had transferred after being repeatedly rejected by American medical schools that did not admit Black students. He was first in his class.

Drew's research on blood preservation, conducted at Columbia University's medical school in the late 1930s, produced the first rigorous demonstration that blood plasma — the liquid fraction of blood, separated from the cellular components — could be stored for long periods without refrigeration and transfused with a much wider compatibility profile than whole blood. This single finding made battlefield transfusion medicine possible at scale.

When Britain faced the Luftwaffe bombing campaign in 1940, Drew was appointed medical director of the Blood for Britain project — the first large-scale blood-plasma banking program in history. He designed the collection, processing, and shipping protocols; organized the system of volunteer donors in New York City; and oversaw the production of approximately 14,500 liters of plasma that were shipped to Britain in the program's five months. When the United States entered the war, Drew was appointed assistant director of the American Red Cross blood donor program — the largest such program in history.

In 1941 and 1942, the American Red Cross, under pressure from the War Department, began segregating the blood supply — labeling donor blood by the race of the donor and issuing it to recipients on the basis of race. Drew, who by then held the most senior American position in the field he had effectively invented, publicly and repeatedly objected. There was no scientific basis for the practice, he told the press and Congress; it was segregation for its own sake, at the cost of the war effort.

Drew resigned from the Red Cross in 1942 and returned to teaching at Howard University Medical School, where he trained more than half of the Black surgeons certified in the United States over the next eight years. He died in 1950 at forty-five, following a car accident in rural North Carolina — an accident that has been surrounded, unfairly, by apocryphal stories that he was denied transfusion at a segregated hospital. (The attending physicians were Black; the hospital that treated him was an emergency facility where segregation was not a factor in his care.) What killed him was the severity of his injuries, not the segregation he had spent his career fighting. The policy he resigned over was formally rescinded by the American Red Cross in 1950, the year of his death.