Charles Drew was born June 3, 1904, to Richard and Nora Drew, the oldest of five children. He attended Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. becoming best known as an athlete. He received the James E. Walker Memorial Medal for all-around athletic performance. At Amherst College, he was a star quarterback, the most valuable baseball player, captain of the track team, and national high hurdles champion. He received the Howard Hill Mossman Trophy as the man who had contributed the most to athletics durng his four years at Amherst.
For two years after college, Charles took a job as athletic director, football coach, and science instructor at Morgan State College in Baltimore. In 1928, he entered medical school at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Charles Drew continued to excell in sports at McGill, just as he had at Amherst. Drew joined Dr. John Beattie, a British professor, in doing blood research. He found it fascinating and decided to give further attention to it. During his two years at Montreal General Hospital, as an intern and resident doctor, he continued his research on blood.

Drew received a fellowship for specialized advanced training from Howard University's Medical School, making it possible for him to study at Columbia University Medical School. Drew's assignment was to learn all he could about collecting and storing blood until it was needed for transfusions. He experimented with blood plasma and discovered that it could be used instead of whole blood. It lasted longer and was less likely to become contaminated. Dr. Drew published his findings in an article called "Banked Blood," since the process of collecting and storing blood was called "banking" it.

Dr. Drew earned his Doctor of Medical Science degree from Columbia University in 1940. This was also the start of World War II. Drew and other American blood specialists were exploring ways to get life-saving blood plasma to the war front when Charles received an urgent request from his former teacher, Dr. John Beattie, who had returned to England. A cablegram asked for 5,000 ampules of dried plasma for transfusions, plus the same amount three weeks later. Dr. Drew was chosen medical supervisor of the "Blood for Britain" project, which helped save the lives of many wounded soldiers.

Following this success, Charles Drew was named director of the Red Cross Blood Bank and assistant director of the National Research Council, in charge of blood collection for the U.S. Army and Navy. As Drew set up the blood bank and trained staff, he also spoke out against the armed forces' directive that blood was to be separated according to the race of the donor. Dr. Drew knew this was wrong, that there was no racial difference in blood. Soldiers and sailors would die needlessly if they had to wait for "same race" blood.

Then on April 1, 1950 while driving to the Andrew Memorial Clinic in Tuskegee, Alabama to deliver the annual lecture, Dr. Drew dozed off as he drove. The car ran off the road and turned over. Drew was badly injured.

Newspaper accounts said that the hospital nearest the accident refused to admit Dr. Drew because of his race, and that precious time was lost in taking him farther down the road to a black hospital. By the time he arrived there, he had lost so much blood that no one could have saved his life. It seemed a cruel hoax that the man who had done more than anyone else in the world to make blood transfusions available to people in emergency situations did not have access to a blood transfusion when he needed it.

According to Dr. Ford (another black physician who was with Dr. Drew in the accident), "Doctor Drew's cause of death was that of a broken neck and complete blockage of the blood flow back to the heart. In the accident, he was half thrown out of the car and actually crushed to death by the car as it rolled over."

Within months of Drew's death, a legend began to circulate -- first within the black and health-care community -- that Drew bled to death because he was denied care at a white-only hospital in North Carolina. "The story of Drew's mistreatment started as a rumor in 1950, grew into a widely circulated historical legend in the 1960s, and has been reported as historical fact in newspapers, magazines, and history and reference books for more than thirty years...."