The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Death
Charles Drew
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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: smnewman@gsbkma.uchicago.edu (Maggie Newman)
Subject: Book Report: One Blood
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 01:44:22 GMT

Anyone interested in contemporary urban folklore should read

Love, Spencie. _One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew_ Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8078-2250-7

This book began as a doctoral dissertation and is introduced by the author's advisor, John Hope Franklin. An auspicious beginning indeed.

The background of its story is this: Charles R. Drew, M.D., died in an automobile accident on April 1, 1950. Drew was an American physician of African descent who had played a key role in setting up the wartime blood bank in New York and in researching methods of storing blood plasma.

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...."

This was not true. But author Love is not content to debunk the myth; rather, she deconstructs it to remarkable effect. As she states, "to what extent is all history . . . an exercise in myth and legend . . . How much have America's . . . traditions been shaped by white supremacist myths and revisionist black legends, both often masquerading as hidden but nonetheless powerful assumptions?"

Quoting Allan Nevins, she adds, "On the granite of hard fact grows the moss of legend, and even pure myth contains its grains of stony reality."

Love proceeds to define five myths that have arisen out of Drew's death: two main ones that were created by the black community, two additional ones that were created as "backlash" myths by the American Red Cross, and a final one that attempts to answer the ARC myths. Her analysis takes her through terrain that afuisti have seen explored by Patricia Turner, whose _I Heard It Through the Grapevine_ is cited in the FAQ. In the course of our journey, the reader will learn interesting information about the racist policies of the American Red Cross as well as fascinating details about the life of the light-skinned, well educated black "elite" of the Washington, D.C. area in the early part of this century.

Most remarkably, in a fascinating piece of detective work the author has managed to trace a possible origin of this myth to an actual death that occurred very close to Drew's, both geographically and chronologically.

All in all, an excellent read.

Maggie-Bob says:

"And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth..."

Acts 17:26


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