Charles Drew

Charles Richard Drew was born on 3 June 1904 in Washington, D.C., the eldest of five children in a middle-class Black family. He was an outstanding athlete in his youth, earning an athletic scholarship to Amherst College, where he excelled in football and track while also pursuing his academic studies, graduating in 1926. He worked as a biology and chemistry instructor and athletics coach at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) to save money before pursuing medicine.

Drew entered McGill University Medical School in Montreal in 1928, one of the few institutions at the time that admitted Black students without the severe restrictions common at American medical schools. He excelled academically, graduating second in his class of 137 in 1933, and completed his internship and residency in Montreal before returning to the United States to teach pathology at Howard University's medical school.

In 1938 Drew received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to pursue doctoral research in blood transfusion medicine at Columbia University, becoming the first Black person to earn a Doctor of Science in Medicine degree there. His 1940 doctoral thesis, 'Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation,' developed and systematised techniques for processing blood into plasma and preserving it for extended storage — solving the critical problem that whole blood could not be stored for long periods, severely limiting large-scale transfusion medicine.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Drew's expertise became urgently needed. In 1940 he was recruited to direct the 'Blood for Britain' programme, organising the collection, processing and shipment of blood plasma from the United States to treat British soldiers and civilians during the Blitz — a logistical and medical achievement that saved an enormous number of lives and established the blueprint for large-scale blood banking still used today. He subsequently helped establish the American Red Cross's national blood banking programme.

In 1941, the US military and the Red Cross implemented a policy of racially segregating donated blood — a decision with no scientific basis, since blood type, not race, determines compatibility. Drew, who had built the very system now being misused this way, publicly and forcefully objected, and resigned his position with the Red Cross in protest, stating there was no valid medical justification for the policy. He returned to Howard University, where he trained a generation of Black surgeons and became the first Black surgeon selected to serve as an examiner for the American Board of Surgery.

Drew died on 1 April 1950 following a car accident in Burlington, North Carolina, at age 45. A persistent but medically inaccurate legend later claimed he died after being refused treatment at a whites-only hospital; in fact, he was treated promptly at a hospital with a Black ward, though the severity of his injuries proved fatal. He was posthumously awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP, and his name has since been given to numerous medical schools, hospitals and scholarship programmes, honouring both his scientific achievement and his principled refusal to let his life's work be used to enforce segregation.