Wash Post Editorial: Dr. Charles Drew Legend
Dave Wilton
addition to the commentary on urban legends in general, others in this
froup may find the fact that a legend arose from Dr. Drew's death on
April First morbidly appropriate.
From The Washington Post, 23 March 1996:
"The Drew Legend"
Copyright 1996 by The Washington Post
It was about this time of year nearly a half-century ago that one
of Washington's most distinguished sons, Dr. Charles Drew, died of
injuries suffered in an automobile accident in a rural part of North
Carolina. Dr. Drew was an outstanding surgeon who had played a key role
in the development of blood plasma--the great lifesaver of World War
II--and his death was widely mourned, especially in his home town and
its African American community, from which he came. "It seemed to me
that only Franklin Roosevelt's funeral was bigger in D.C.," one of his
sisters later recalled.
But in the years that followed, an odd thing happened: Dr. Drew's
death--or, to be more accurate, a widely accepted account of his
death--became better known even than his life. It was something that
many people simply "knew" for a fact: that the physician who had helped
develop blood plasma bled to death after a southern hospital refused
him treatment because of his race.
The story wasn't true. As writer Spencie Love notes in a new book
on Dr. Drew (published by the University of North Carolina Press), the
doctor--who was traveling to Georgia with two colleagues on April 1,
1950, when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and crashed--received
good, standard emergency medical treatment at the small North Carolina
hospital where he was taken, but could not be saved. Members of the
Drew family (including his daughter Charlene Drew Jarvis, a city
council member) and others have attempted over the years to correct
what Ms. Love calls "the Drew legend," with limited success. "I've been
trying to bury Charlie Drew for 32 years," remarked one of the doctors
who was with him on the fatal trip in 1982 [sic]. "I don't know how
often I have to say what happened to get it right."
Getting it right is what Ms. Love is about, but in a deeper way
than merely presenting the facts about Dr. Drew's death, which she
does. The durability of the legend, she writes, "reveals a large truth
at the heart of black culture: it demonstrates the continuing
psychological trauma of segregation and racism in American life." For
so many reasons, the story *could* have been true [emphasis original]:
The country had a long history of neglecting the health care of black
Americans; the hospital where Dr. Drew died had only a few beds for
blacks, and they were in the basement; blood plasma actually was
segregated by race, a practice Dr. Drew tried to stop. Indeed, Ms. Love
tells the story of another black man, Maltheus Avery, who did die of
injuries after being denied treatment at North Carolina hospital only
months after Dr. Drew's death.
The Drew legend could be made into an Oliver Stone movie: the
"father" of blood plasma denied a lifesaving transfusion because of his
race. Ms. Love does it the better way, though: With footnotes,
bibliography and careful documentation, she seeks to get at "the truth
Charles Drew bore witness to...that we all indeed are one blood. Race
itself, as history and science reveal, is but another cultural myth."
She lets the facts spoil a good story in order to tell a much better
one.
---End---
--Dave Wilton
dwi...@ix.netcom.com
Bruce Tindall
>on Dr. Drew (published by the University of North Carolina Press),
Ms. Love will be reading from and discussing her book, _One Blood:
The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew_, Monday, March 25,
at 7:00 p.m. at the Regulator Bookstore in Durham, N.C., in case
any local AFUisti are interested.
--
Bruce Tindall tin...@panix.com Apex, N.C.
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