April 1, 1950, 75 years ago: Dr. Charles Drew dies as the result of a car crash in Burlington, North Carolina. He was only 45 years old.
Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904 in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, playing football and running track. He put himself through medical school by teaching biology and chemistry, and serving as the football coach and the 1st athletic director, at Morgan College, a historically black school in Baltimore, now known as Morgan State University.
He graduated from medical school at McGill University in Montreal, going there because Howard University, in his hometown, and known as "the Black Harvard," thought he hadn't met their academic standards. But after his graduation from McGill, Howard offered him a teaching position. He accepted, but later left to earn his doctorate at Columbia University.
He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces' lives during the war.
As the most prominent African-American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950 -- too late for him, as it turned out.
In 1939, Drew married Minnie Lenore Robbins, a professor of home economics at Spelman College in Atlanta. They had 3 daughters and a son. In 1944, the NAACP awarded him its annual Spingarn Medal, for an outstanding achievement by an African-American, for his work in supplying blood for the Allied war effort.
Beginning in 1939, Drew traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama, to attend the annual free clinic at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital. For the 1950 Tuskegee clinic, Drew drove along with 3 other black physicians. Drew was driving around 8:00 AM on April 1. Still fatigued from spending the night before in the operating theater, he lost control of the vehicle. After careening into a field, the car somersaulted 3 times. The 3 other physicians sustained minor injuries. Drew was trapped in the car with severe wounds. His foot had become wedged beneath the brake pedal.
When reached by emergency technicians, he was in shock and barely alive, due to severe leg injuries. He was taken to Alamance General Hospital in Burlington, North Carolina. He was pronounced dead a half hour after he first received medical attention -- ironically, from massive blood loss.
A myth arose, repeated on an early episode of the TV show M*A*S*H, that he died because an all-white Southern hospital had refused him admittance because he was black. It wasn't true: The hospital's white doctors examined him, but knew there was nothing that could be done. If there had been a black hospital, or a white hospital, closer to the crash site, they couldn't have saved him, either.
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