A Legendary Death, A Legendary Racial Divide

On the first of April 1950 Dr. Charles Drew, the African-American scientist and surgeon, a pioneer in blood research and the establishment of the blood bank, died following an automobile accident in rural North Carolina, a tragedy that endures in the collective memory of Afro-America. Legend has it that his death was entirely preventable. In one version Drew bled to death after being refused emergency treatment at a whites-only hospital. Another says that Drew died en route to Duke University Hospital in Durham, thirty miles from the accident scene, where he was sent because the Jim Crow ward at the local hospital was full. Still another states that Drew, the discoverer of blood plasma, was refused blood on account of his race. The accounts are false. Charles Drew received every measure available in a small rural hospital to save his life, according to both the attending physicians and Drew’s traveling companions. Yet within days, rumors about Drew’s death, all turning on allegations of racist medical malpractice, began to course through black America; they have since multiplied and circulated widely, gaining mythic proportions and have, as a result of the civil rights movement, even shown up in school text books. But what may not be factually accurate may contain an abundance of historical truth. Partly a biography, and complementing nicely Charles Wynes’s Charles Richard Drew: The Man and the Myth (1988), Spencie Love’s One Blood untangles the legends of Drew’s work with blood plasma and explains how they lent credence to those of his death. Drawing on psychology, anthropology, and folklore, Love also examines the legends’ meanings and validity, accounts for their persistence in African-American culture, and in their light scrutinizes the dominant American myths of this country as a land of opportunity for all.

The oldest of five children, Charles Drew was born in 1904 and grew up in Washington, D. C. The nation’s capital was a Jim Crow city, and in the years following Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) life opportunities for African Americans narrowed. Charles Drew’s parents were of modest means, but his father’s steady employment as a skilled craftsman and his mother’s Howard University education ensured their presence in Washington’s black middle class and shielded him from segregation’s more stultifying effects. Educated in the city’s uniquely excellent black public schools, he was graduated from the famed Dunbar High School in 1922. A good student, he also competed in track and football, both scholastically and at Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1926. Drew encountered racism on and off the field, in and out of college. He was beaten up by opposing football players, and his own teammates denied him his rightful place as captain. He chose to study medicine at McGill University in Montreal because no American school except Howard and Meharry had as strong a reputation for admitting black students. Despite an outstanding academic record, he was rejected for surgical residencies in the United States. Later in life, he was denied membership in the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons. Seeking and accepting a position at Howard University Medical School in 1935, Drew worked in conjunction with President Mordecai Johnson and Dean Numa Adams to establish a top-flight institution and train skilled physicians, including in medical specialties like surgery.

What was outstanding about Drew and helped to contribute to his iconic status even before his death was the way he surmounted the problems that were common to ambitious black men of his generation: “Drew’s pattern was to drive himself to excel . . . and, in succeeding, to scale racial barriers that none before had scaled—and thus open new doors for others” (p. 111). Drew entered Columbia University’s medical school in 1938 on a two-year research fellowship, which led to his trailblazing doctoral thesis on banking blood. But he would...