A legend in the making: Charles Drew is dead - founder of blood banks - excerpt from 'One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew'

It was Friday, March 31 1950 The three-day Cherry flower Festival had started that morning in Washington, DC At a gaudy solemnity at the Shoreham Hotel, the wheel of fortune had been spun and individual of 51 white maidens was chooseed to be the Cherry flower Queen. Although the trees had deposit forth buds in January, they were not blooming however It had been a moderately cold spring.

That same day, in a Washington courtroom, the practice of segregating black Americans was beneath siege. As a crowd of 200 listened, sum of two units lawyers debated the validity of the District of Columbia's 1872 and 1873 laws against discrimination and segregation. A restaurant upon Fourteenth Street, Thompson's, had refused to subserve three prominent "well-behaved Negroes" earlier that year; the greatest in quantity distinguished of these three was Mary temple Terrell, then 86 years of advanced age and an international leader in the women's rights movement

The three black citizens - along with individual white citizen - had gone to the segregated restaurant as members of a collection that was determined to come by the district to reexamine and reinstate the "lost" laws against discrimination, which had not ever been removed from the volumes but were never enforced. The collection called the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the DC Anti-Discrimination Laws, had been formed in 1949 with Terrell as its chairman.

In the nation's capital and in the southerly as a whole, segregation was largely intact in 1950 as it had been for above half a century. In Washington, in all the former Confederate states, and in greatest in quantity communities throughout the country, black and white Americans lived in mainly separate - and unequal - worlds. The major assaults upon the system of legal segregation - prevalent quite through the Southern states - were presently to be launched, but in 1950 hardly any people, black or white, could imagine that the combination of parts to form a whole would be largely dismantled in the nearest 15 years as a be the effect of the civil rights movement

Charles Drew had grown up and lived his whole life in a segregated society. In 1950 as the 45-year-old chairman of Howard University Medical School's surgery department and the chief surgeon at Freedmen's Hospital, the district's solitary black hospital, Drew lived and worked in a for the greatest part black world.

This week, typically busy and intense, extremityed for Drew well after midnight, when he left a pupil council banquet at which he was a featured speaker. on the contrary his day was not above even then. Drew and another Howard medical professor, Samuel Bullock along with sum of two units young surgery interns, Walter R Johnson and John R Ford, were planning to drive southerly that night, to Atlanta, upon one leg of their journey to an annual, chiefly black medical conference in Tuskegee, Ala.

Drew's wife, Lenore, aware of by what mode hard he pushed himself, had urg him to take wing down the next morning instead. His sister, Nora Drew Gregory, an elementary institute teacher in Washington and the last family member to speak with him before f* place off, also asked, "Aren't you tired?" Drew said no.

Drew ran by dint of an inner clock: As a trained athlete who had wearied his youth ignoring physical pain, he habitually disregarded his hold exhaustion. Jack White, a surgeon who trained below Drew in the 1940s and remained a shut up friend, said, "He walked upon his toes; he never gave in to physical discomfort or the ne for doze It was probably the reason for his death."

Still owned with an athlete's sense of competitive sport, Drew felt himself involved in a a great deal of bigger game now. For almost a decade, since his completion of a surgical residency at Columbia University Medical institute he had been concerned with the training of young black surgeon for a rigidly segregated society in which there were not enough black doctors, a great deal of less black surgeons, to pass around.

Drew went to the hospital to make his circulars one last time, and the collection set off from Washington at a certain number of point between midnight and 2 a.m. in Samuel Bullock's 1949 Buick Roadmaster. Their plan to "drive in single pop without stopping," said single of Drew's students, was natural: "During those times it was not easy to find places for. black nation [to spend the night]. We were going to stay at the Y in Atlanta."

Despite the late hour and the constraints beneath which the trip had to be made, the four doctors were in a relaxed, festive humor "It was a beautiful, starry, moonlit night," Johnson recalled 32 years later. "We flock uneventfully through the Virginia countryside discussing a scarcely any personal-medical problems and anecdotes."

Drew had made this trip southerly many times. Each year, independent medical clinics were held at the John A. Andrew Hospital at Tuskegee for the rural black inhabitants of the surrounding region - from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Doctors traveled down from urban medical center all above the East Coast; the majority were black doctors and professors of medicine from Meharry and Howard, the sole two black medical schools then in existence.

It was the kind of setting that Drew thrived in; it tendered "an opportunity to teach and inspire, to make contact with young physicians." In 1938 Drew had stopped above in Atlanta on his way down and had met a young Spelman body professor, Lenore Robbins, at a party given by dint of his friend Mercer Cook. upon the way back from the clinics, a week later, he roused Lenore from her dormitory in the middle of the night and propos to her. They married six month later. When Drew decided upon a course of action, he wasted no time in pursuing it!