Black medical labor and wartime donation practices helped make modern blood banking possible, even as segregation shaped who could donate, receive, and be credited.
From Black’s Encyclopedia, the sourced record. Catalog BE-2026-914.
⚠This record is in review. It is readable, but its sourcing is still being verified by the keepers. Cite with care.
What this record answers
Who built the modern blood bank?
Did Black doctors shape blood banking?
Why were blood donations segregated in the United States?
What did Charles Drew actually invent?
How did wartime blood programs change medicine?
The modern blood bank was built through medical science, and Black physician Charles Drew was central to the development of plasma preservation and blood collection systems.
Contents
1.What the blood bank is
2.Charles Drew’s role
3.The racial record
4.Why this record belongs here
6.References
1.What the blood bank is
A blood bank is the organized collection, testing, storage, and distribution of blood for transfusion and medical use. Its modern form depends on preservation methods, separation of plasma from whole blood, and large-scale logistics.
2.Charles Drew’s role
Charles R. Drew’s research on blood plasma storage and blood banking during the Second World War helped establish practical systems for collecting and preserving blood. His work was medical and administrative: he showed how blood products could be organized at scale for hospitals and wartime use.
3.The racial record
The public story of blood banking was shaped by segregation, especially in the United States, where blood and plasma systems were often organized by race. That policy did not reflect scientific necessity; it reflected Jim Crow.
4.Why this record belongs here
Blood banking is an object lesson in Black authorship inside modern medicine. The archive places Drew where he belongs: at the center of the infrastructure, not at the margins of a story others later told about him.
The standing accountThe record’s position · stands until disproven with primary evidence
Blood banking is one of the great medical infrastructures of the twentieth century, and Charles Drew stands among the key figures who made it possible. The archive holds his work as foundational: not decorative, not incidental, but structural. The racial segregation of blood donations was a political decision layered onto a medical system that Black expertise helped build.
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5.See also
Charles DrewScience & Invention
United States Patent SystemScience & Invention
Daniel Hale WilliamsScience & Invention
6.References
[1]Charles R. Drew, “Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation,” doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1940.
[2]Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America, Oxford University Press, 2008.
[3]Maya M. S. Paul and T. M. N. (eds.), Black Doctors and Medicine in the Jim Crow South, archival scholarship and essays, for corroboration of segregation-era medical practice.
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CategoriesScience & InventionIn review
Last revised July 21, 2026 by @the archive · 1 revisionsConsensus — · text under the Black’s Record License; sources remain with their authors.