Planting a tradition of excellence

Carrying a tray of bright red geraniums, Dr. Charles Richard Drew led his daughter to the backyard of their comfortable three-story house on the campus of Howard University in Washington D.C., where a circular arrangement of colorful blooms awaited them. 

Working between 12 and 16 hours a day as a surgeon and scientist, Drew regularly abstained from vacations and church attendance, but always made time to tend the sizeable flower garden. On this warm spring day, he tasked his daughter, Sylvia, to help plant them.  

Drew outlined her seemingly simple job in detail: dig a hole, take the flower out of its tray, place it in the hole, then pack dirt firmly around the plant so that the stalk would stand up straight and tall. The 5-year-old affirmed that she understood. 

Knees in the dirt, Sylvia grabbed the garden trowel and repeatedly plunged the tool into the earth until she had made an adequate hole. Grasping the leafy green stem, she plucked the first flower out of the tray, placed it in the hole, and covered the base with dirt before looking to her father for approval. 

Laying the small garden shovel down, Drew informed his daughter that they couldn’t move on to the next one. She protested: she had put the plant in the hole and covered the roots with dirt, just like he asked. He reiterated his stance and explained that, without packed dirt, the geranium could die because it didn’t have the support it needed to grow. They had to go back and try again.  

“So I worked very hard to get that dirt packed hard around the flower,” Sylvia Drew Ivie – now 80 years old – recalled of that childhood memory from 1949. Drew praised her redone efforts, and they moved to the next plant. “And that’s the way we proceeded to plant all those little red flowers. I remember how important it was to me to listen to the instructions, to follow his directions, and to get it right.”

Even in something as mundane as planting flowers, Drew firmly believed in adhering to a stringent standard of excellence. His children and medical students remembered his motto well: “Excellence of performance will transcend artificial barriers created by man.”  

He maintained his commitment to excellence in whatever he did, from his research and groundbreaking leadership in blood plasma preservation and storage to what he saw as his most important innovation: training a cadre of elite Black surgeons at Howard University’s medical school and placing them in institutions and hospitals across the country. These efforts brought him into direct conflict with the prevalent racism that permeated every aspect of his life in Jim Crow-era America. But he had conviction that excellence would win the day. 

Born June 3, 1904, in his maternal grandparents’ home in Washington, D.C., Drew grew up with four younger siblings in a house chock full of books in Foggy Bottom, named for the recurring early morning and evening fogs that rose from the nearby Potomac River to blanket the neighborhood. The Drews were part of the city’s thriving Black middle class, and “Charlie” lived in a supportive and loving household that expected the best of its members.  

His mother, Nora, a graduate of Howard University, served on the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church’s Board of Trustees and started the first Black YMCA in Arlington, Virginia. His father, Richard, a red-haired, freckled family man, athlete, singer, and carpet-layer, was the financial secretary for the Local 85 of the Carpet, Linoleum, and Soft Tile-Layers Union — and its only Black member.  

Drew emulated his parents by becoming a paperboy at 12 years old for the Washington Times and Herald and the Evening Star. By age 13, he had six other boys working for him at his newspaper enterprise.  

His vibrant personality and unbending work ethic were the cornerstones of his character, Drew’s siblings recalled.  

“[Charlie] played the saxophone badly, the piano loudly … and sang — we called them ‘Charlie’s shouts,’” his sister Nora said. A tall, powerful man, red-headed and freckled like his father, “He commanded respect by his presence.”  

According to his youngest sister Eva, “Charlie was the reliable one … he worked hard and was very conscientious. He was totally organized down to the last t … I adored him and I was a little bit afraid of him.”   

Drew’s ambition is captured in his 1922 senior year high school yearbook: “You can do anything you think you can.”

Over the next 15 years, Drew would complete a surgical residency and a two-year fellowship, conduct world-changing research and work in blood preservation and storage in the middle of an earth-shattering world war, and reach the pinnacle of his career as a renowned surgeon and trainer of other Black surgeons. 

Shortly after his arrival, Howard’s leadership recognized Drew’s potential and awarded him one of the first two-year fellowships for advanced training at Columbia University in New York City in 1938. He was assigned to work under Dr. John Scudder, a fortuitous match. Scudder’s research focused on fluid balance and blood storage and preservation, topics that first interested Drew at Amherst that he further studied at McGill. His 1940 dissertation, “Banked Blood,” put him at the top of the field and prepared him for the work that would bring him international acclaim. He was the first African American to earn the Doctor of Science in Medicine degree. 

But he saw his surgical residency at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital, which he completed alongside his research, as the crowning jewel. In the hospital’s wards, Drew honed the skills that he craved to take back to Howard and start his life’s work training Black surgeons. He made his desire known in a May 1940 letter to former Dunbar High School coach Edwin Henderson: 

“[For] seventy years there has been a Howard Medical School but still there is no tradition; no able surgeon has ever been trained there; no school of thought has been born here; few of their stars have ever hit the headlines. In American surgery, there are no Negro representatives … all Negro doctors are just country practitioners … not given to too much intellectual activity and not particularly interested in advancing medicine. This attitude I should like to change. It should be great sport." 

In the middle of outlining his career trajectory, Drew’s ambitious pursuit of excellence led him to his wife, Minnie “Lenore” Robbins, a young instructor of home economics at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. He met her in the spring of 1939 when he stopped in Atlanta to visit friends on his way to a clinic at Tuskegee. He proposed three days after their first encounter, completely head-over-heels in love. He wrote to Lenore shortly after returning home, “Later, when I become coherent, I shall perhaps see many things, but tonight this one thing alone seems to ring clearly — I love you.” They were married in September, settling into a New York apartment while Drew continued at Columbia. They would eventually have four children together: “Bebe” Roberta, Charlene Rosella, Rhea Sylvia, and Charles Richard, Jr. 

However, despite all of Drew’s achievements and accolades, racism soon stained his efforts. In late 1941, the Red Cross announced that it would follow the Armed Forces policy of refusing blood plasma donations from Black Americans — only white donors could contribute. After an immense storm of protest, the organization changed its policy from exclusion to segregation — blood plasma would be separated by race.  

At first, Drew protested against the segregationist policy in letters to friends, colleagues, and military officials when he had the chance, explaining calmly and logically that the policy had no scientific basis. His method of fighting racism involved “doing and showing,” climbing to ever greater heights in the scientific arena.  

“The human body to him was uniformly the same whatever you were, and blood was uniformly the same whatever you were,” Ivie added.   

However, he recognized the need for stronger protest and Black leadership when it arose. When he received the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) 1943 Spingarn Medal for his work in blood plasma research, he made his first public speech attacking the blood segregation policy in the spring of 1944: 

"It is unfortunate that such a worthwhile and scientific bit of work should have been hampered by such stupidity … I feel duty bound under such honors to become more aware of the great needs we have in all fields of activity when leadership is forced upon one in a manner quite comparable to this … I pledge you that in the future as I have tried in less degree in the past, I shall try to be worthy of this great honor … It is imperative therefore that we meet this new form [of discrimination] and smash it as we must smash all the others."  

The Red Cross did not change its policy of segregating blood until December 1950 — after Drew’s sudden death.  

Surgery was his first love, and it showed. He was certified by the American Board of Surgery in April 1941 and appointed as the first Black board examiner in October. He was later elected as a fellow to the International College of Surgeons and served as a consultant to the U.S. Surgeon General. The two patents on which he’s named as a co-inventor are for improvements to surgical tools: the design of the “Surgical needle” protected by U.S. Patent No. 2,389,355 made it easy to clean and prevented clogging, while the “Surgical suction apparatus” (U.S. Patent No. 2,397,257) was sturdy, compact, and cheaper to manufacture than other devices of the day – qualities that made it perfect for military or wilderness use.

Sharing the vision of medical school dean Numa P.G. Adams, Drew wanted to transform Howard University Medical School and Freedmen’s Hospital into top-tier institutions, capable of training the finest Black surgeons and scientists and offering quality health care to the city’s African American population.  

A labor of love that would encompass the rest of his life, Drew threw himself headlong into teaching. 

“There is very little time for research, but the boys whom we are now helping to train, I believe, in time will constitute my greatest contribution to medicine,” he wrote in a 1947 letter to Amherst College president Charles W. Cole.  

While his work as an educator was demanding, Drew cherished his role as his family’s loving provider and protector. When his daughter Charlene stepped on a piece of glass and cut her foot as she played in their front yard, he ran to the rescue.  

“My foot bled rather profusely. My mother put me in a little red wagon and wrapped my foot. I looked up to see my father coming,” she said, adding that Freedmen’s Hospital was just a block away from their house on College Street, and Lenore had called her husband to help. “His white coat ... and his tie [were] flapping in the wind, so he was coming very, very fast.” 

Charlene worried that her father would be angry that she was outside without shoes, “but he was gentle. He rewrapped the foot and pulled me in that little red wagon over to Freedmen’s Hospital.” 

Like his children, Drew’s students remembered "Big Red” as a passionate educator, advocate, and model who cared for them deeply, but held them to strict standards. He was warm and understanding, but hard-driving and firm. He insisted on excellence, but readily offered confident encouragement to students in whom he saw potential. Burke Syphax, one of Drew’s students who later taught surgery at Howard, remembered of Drew’s teaching style, “His forte — what made him different — was his knack of stimulating others. He went beyond being a teacher; he was a leader of men.”  

His daughter Sylvia put it another way: “His insistence on excellence ...[was] not beating it out of people but loving it out of people.”

When his first batch of graduates traveled to Johns Hopkins University in 1948 to take their certification exam before the American Board of Surgery, Drew was overcome with intense concern as he waited to hear the results. His wife Lenore recalled, “... he had never been more anxious about anything... ‘Your boys will do alright,’ I tried to console him. ‘All right won’t be good enough,’ he said. ‘They’re up there at Hopkins competing with graduates of the top medical schools ... with rich boys, Lenore, boys who’ve had every advantage.’” 

He went down into the basement, picked up a sledgehammer and pounded against an old coal bin stored in the space.  

“He just used all his energy and anxiety about how his students were doing to just bang this old disposable bin into a piece of flat metal,” said his daughter Sylvia. “All we heard was bang, bang, bang upstairs. But that’s the way he worked it out.” 

As it turned out, his worries were unfounded: two of his students came in first and second in the exam. After he found out the good news, he dropped into a chair.  

Lenore remembered, “Tears filled his eyes ... and his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘First and second. Well, what do you know about that?’”