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Letters, Arts & Sciences · Medicine

Charles R. Drew

1904 – 1950

Surgeon and researcher who directed early large-scale U.S. blood banking and trained a generation of Black surgeons at Howard University.

Drawing of Charles R. Drew by the artist Charles Alston, 1943
Charles Alston, 1943. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Charles R. Drew was the surgeon and researcher who directed the Blood for Britain project and the American Red Cross’s first pilot blood bank on the eve of the Second World War, turning laboratory work on plasma preservation into large-scale practice. He publicly condemned the Red Cross policy of segregating Black donors’ blood as scientifically baseless, and he spent the last decade of his life at Howard University training the surgeons who would break the color line in American surgery.

At a Glance

Born
3 June 1904, Washington, D.C.
Died
1 April 1950, Burlington, North Carolina
Birth name
Charles Richard Drew
Known for
“Banked Blood” (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1940); Blood for Britain (1940–1941); American Red Cross pilot blood bank and mobile collection units (1941); chief of surgery, Freedmen’s Hospital (1941–1950)
HBCU ties
Morgan State University (Director of athletics and instructor in biology and chemistry at Morgan College, 1926–1928); Howard University (Faculty, College of Medicine, from 1935; chair of the Department of Surgery from 1941)
Fields
Medicine · Science · Education
Era
Letters, Arts & Sciences

Early Life

Charles Richard Drew was born in Washington, D.C., on 3 June 1904, the eldest child of Richard Drew, a carpet layer and financial secretary of his union, and Nora Burrell Drew, a graduate of Miner Normal School. He attended Stevens Elementary School and Dunbar High School, then among the strongest college-preparatory schools open to Black students anywhere in the country, graduating in 1922. In 1920 his sister Elsie died of tuberculosis complicated by influenza, a loss that biographers connect to his turn toward medicine.

Drew entered Amherst College in 1922 on an athletic scholarship and became one of the college’s leading athletes. A biology course with Otto Glaser drew him toward the medical sciences, and he received his A.B. in 1926. Lacking money for medical school, he spent 1926 to 1928 at Morgan College in Baltimore as director of athletics and instructor in biology and chemistry.

He then enrolled at McGill University in Montreal, where he received the degrees of Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery in 1933, graduating second in a class of 137. He completed his internship and a surgical residency at Montreal General Hospital between 1933 and 1935.

Life and Work

After his father’s death in 1935, Drew returned to Washington and joined the faculty of the Howard University College of Medicine as an instructor in pathology, moving into surgery under Edward Lee Howes. A two-year fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board sent him to Columbia University and Presbyterian Hospital in New York for advanced surgical training. There he ran an experimental blood bank for seven months and studied the preservation of blood and plasma. His dissertation, “Banked Blood,” earned him the degree of Doctor of Medical Science in June 1940; he was the first African American to receive that degree from Columbia.

In the summer of 1940, with Britain under German air attack, Drew became medical supervisor of the Blood for Britain project, which collected blood from donors in New York hospitals and shipped plasma overseas. Between August 1940 and January 1941 the program collected 14,556 donations and sent more than 5,000 liters of plasma saline solution to Britain. Drew’s task was to standardize collection and processing across participating hospitals so that the plasma shipped overseas was safe to use, and the project established him as a leading authority on blood procurement and processing.

In February 1941 Drew became assistant director of a three-month American Red Cross pilot program in New York to mass-produce dried plasma for the U.S. armed forces. During that program he introduced mobile collection units, later called bloodmobiles. The national program that grew out of the pilot was marred by racism from the start: the military and the Red Cross at first excluded Black donors altogether, and from January 1942 accepted their blood only on condition that it be labeled and kept separate. Drew denounced the policy publicly as having no scientific basis and as an insult to Black Americans. The widely repeated story that he resigned in protest over it is not supported by the record, however: he had returned to Howard in April 1941, at the end of the pilot program, to build its surgical training program.

In October 1941 Drew became chairman of the Department of Surgery at Howard and chief of surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital, and that year became the first African American examiner for the American Board of Surgery. He regarded the training of surgeons as his most important work. Between 1941 and 1950 he trained eight of the Black surgeons then certified by the American Board of Surgery — more than half the national total — and partly trained fourteen more; in December 1948 his first group of residents took the board examinations, and two earned the top scores. He repeatedly pressed the American Medical Association and other professional bodies to end racially exclusionary membership practices, and remained ineligible for AMA membership because the local medical society barred Black physicians. The NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1944, and in 1949 he spent six weeks inspecting military medical facilities in Europe as a surgical consultant to the Surgeon General’s office.

Legacy

On 1 April 1950 Drew was driving with three Howard residents to a medical meeting at the John A. Andrew Memorial Clinic in Tuskegee, Alabama, when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel near Haw River, North Carolina. The car left the road and overturned. He was taken to Alamance General Hospital in Burlington, a segregated hospital, where white surgeons began treating him immediately; his injuries, which included massive chest injuries, a nearly severed leg, and a broken neck, were not survivable, and he died about an hour after arriving. The legend that he bled to death because a white hospital refused to treat him — repeated for decades in magazines and books — is false. One of the Howard physicians in the car, who was himself admitted to the hospital, later described his own care as excellent, and Drew’s family thanked the doctors for their efforts. Historian Spencie Love, who examined the case in One Blood (1996), traced how the story took hold: it was believable because Black patients in the segregated South were in fact routinely denied hospital care, even though that is not what happened to Drew.

Drew is often called the father of the blood bank, a title that simplifies the collective history of transfusion medicine but reflects his central role in turning research into a working national system. His papers are held at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, along with many schools and health centers, bears his name. The generation of surgeons he trained at Howard carried his standards into academic medicine at a time when most American hospitals and professional societies still excluded them.

For Educators

Scientific knowledge does not automatically defeat prejudice: Drew helped build modern blood banking and then publicly condemned a segregation policy that the science showed to be baseless. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 3 June 1904 Born in Washington, D.C.
  2. 1926 Graduates from Amherst College.
  3. 1933 Receives M.D. and C.M. degrees from McGill University, second in a class of 137.
  4. 1935 Joins the Howard University College of Medicine faculty.
  5. June 1940 Earns Doctor of Medical Science at Columbia with the dissertation “Banked Blood.”
  6. August 1940 Becomes medical supervisor of the Blood for Britain project.
  7. February 1941 Named assistant director of the American Red Cross pilot blood bank program.
  8. October 1941 Becomes chief of surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital and chair of surgery at Howard.
  9. 1944 Receives the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal.
  10. 1 April 1950 Dies of injuries from a car accident near Burlington, North Carolina.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. National Library of Medicine, “The Charles R. Drew Papers,” Profiles in Science. Link
  2. National Library of Medicine, “Becoming ‘the Father of the Blood Bank,’ 1938–1941,” Profiles in Science. Link
  3. National Library of Medicine, “‘My Chief Interest Was and Is Surgery’: Howard University, 1941–1950,” Profiles in Science. Link
  4. Spencie Love, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
  5. Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, “The Truth About the Death of Charles Drew” (2004). Link

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Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Charles R. Drew. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/charles-drew/
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Black-History.com Editors. “Charles R. Drew.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/charles-drew/.
Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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