When Blood Won't Tell: Integrated Transfusions and Shifting Foundations of Race

On May 29, 1956, nurses climbed aboard USS Lake Champlain to collect a thousand pints of crew member blood. A US military photographer was on hand to document the event, not because blood drives were rare but rather to spotlight a marked change. In the single shot selected for print, the photographer captured the moment of exchange between a white nurse and the only African American navy man in line [Figure 1]. The image was part of a series of military photographs taken during the 1950s intended to chronicle an integrated army. However, despite the photographer's objective to offer visual evidence of purportedly seamless racial integration, the image could not contain the awkwardness of that blood drive. To keep her bodily distance, the nurse fully extends her arm to give the African American man the vial; her white hands nearly but, importantly, do not touch his black hands—both visible strains that more accurately represent the stutter steps of desegregation. Perhaps most revealing is the unhappy expression of the seaman instructed to hold his pose and the firm gaze of the second nurse who peers through her glasses to stare at the man whose blood will only be marked by type, not by race.

The American Red Cross (ARC) integrated the national blood supply in 1950. For the first time on a large scale, blood moved indiscriminately between differently raced bodies. By the end of the Korean War in 1953, tens of thousands of US servicemen returned home with racially anonymous transfused blood coursing through their veins. And given the continual need for blood in hospitals across the nation, researchers estimated that the integrated supply would reach millions more in the decades to come.¹ Despite efforts to show otherwise, the photograph shown in Figure 1 could not contain the significance of mixing the national blood supply, of allowing black blood to travel freely into white bodies. The tension in the photograph signaled the challenge of narrating transfusions after 1950. Once the ARC desegregated blood, conversations about transfusions required careful management, for blood carried with it deep-rooted associations as well as the legal power to determine who had access to citizenship, property, and marriage.

Figure 1.

Official photograph, US Navy, USS Lake Champlain, May 29, 1956, CVA-39-4595, Military Photographic Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

This essay considers what happened to blood at this moment of change. It traces how blood—so central to conversations about race for decades—receded into the background by the 1950s. Beginning with civil rights protests against the ARC's blood-segregating policies during World War II and ending with the National Blood Program's (NBP's) rescripting of blood during the Korean War (1950–1953), the essay explores how Cold War and civil rights pressures converged to reconfigure blood as a less potent symbol of race. After the ARC desegregated blood, the NBP's publicity council, organizations like UNESCO, and mainstream media actively ushered conversations about race away from blood. Together, they narrated transfusions in ways that changed popular assumptions about blood, downplayed the significance of its mixture, and helped drive race-identifying practices away from the body altogether.

After its integration, blood would never be quite the same. Blood symbolized too much yet not enough all at once. The malleable, nonvisible, and manipulatable fluid had served those interested in upholding white power well in their efforts to designate blackness in the court of law, yet after its integration, they abandoned it albeit begrudgingly. While some doctors, blood collection agencies, and hospitals primarily in the South refused to follow the ARC's integration policy, most were forced to give up on blood as a way to categorize race. For in its new irreversibly mixed form, blood could no longer uphold the fiction of white purity. As the body became an increasingly unstable location for race identification, Americans would witness—and some would take part in—utilizing culture instead of blood to differentiate white from other. The...