Fifty-five years ago, on December 31, 1969, President Richard Nixon proclaimed the first National Blood
Donor Month in January 1970 to honor voluntary blood donors and to encourage people to give blood.
January 20th is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday established in 1983. The holiday has
transformed a decade later to include a National Day of Service honoring Dr. King’s activism and service
that paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both of these January commemorations are
connected in significant and perhaps unexpected ways, especially if one goes back to the era of World
War II.
World War II was the first war in which the banking and transporting of blood products to battlefields
and military hospitals saved countless lives, thanks to Dr. Richard Drew, an African-American doctor who
was born in Washington DC in 1904. In 1928, Drew began medical school at McGill University in
Montreal, Canada, where he studied with a visiting professor from Great Britain, Dr. John Beattie, an
expert in blood transfusion medicine at a time when there was growing interest in blood banking. The
Nobel Prize in physiology in 1930 was awarded for the discovery of blood group antigens (blood typing),
which made compatible blood transfusions possible. But in 1933, when Richard Drew received his
Doctor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees from McGill, the logistics of blood donation were still
largely impracticable, since whole blood had a shelf life of only one week.
In 1938, as a Rockefeller Fellow at Columbia University’s Presbyterian Hospital in NYC, Dr. Drew studied
the storage and distribution of donated blood, and developed new and practical methods to separate
blood plasma so that it had a shelf life of two months. Though the plasma couldn’t carry oxygen as
effectively as whole blood, it was invaluable to victims of trauma. After completing his dissertation,
“Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation,” Richard Drew was tapped by the US government in 1940
to be the medical director of the Blood for Britain campaign. This campaign began when Great Britain
was suffering the effects of heavy bombing from the German Luftwaffe. The United States knew it was
only a matter of time before America entered the war and could benefit from having the infrastructure
and know-how in place to ship blood products overseas.
The following year, when the Blood for Britain campaign finished, the US Red Cross recruited Dr. Drew
to start a pilot program for blood collection and distribution that included community donation centers
like store fronts, factory floors and “bloodmobiles,” which became one of Dr. Drew’s defining
innovations. But not long after his appointment, Dr. Richard Drew felt compelled to resign from the Red
Cross. At the behest of the racially segregated US military, in 1942, the organization implemented a
policy to identify and segregate all collected blood units by race, to ensure that a white patient would
never receive blood from a black donor. Upon his resignation, Dr. Drew boiled his objections down to
three reasons: 1) an official department of the government should not willfully humiliate its citizens 2)
there was no scientific basis for the practice, and 3) US soldiers needed the blood. He returned to his
home city of Washington, DC to be chief surgeon at Freedmen’s Hospital.
While continuing to research and advocate for change, Dr. Drew became a sought-after speaker. One of
his very first speaking engagements in May of 1942, was in Shreveport, Louisiana, when he spoke at the
annual conference of the Louisiana Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association. Later known as the
Louisiana Medical Association, this organization was Louisiana’s African-American medical professional
association.
1942 was also the year when the Shreveport Memorial Blood Bank (now LifeShare Blood Center)
opened to serve northwest Louisiana as one of the country’s first community blood banks, using their
own blood banking machine, a dried plasma system. Blood collected there was intended for homefront
use by local hospitals, and was banked in case of a regional emergency. The Red Cross continued its
collection for wartime use at its collection centers in major cities. By the time of the Korean War,
however, this wartime collection for military use had expanded to Northwest Louisiana, anchored by a
blood center in the science building at Centenary college in Shreveport.
A blood mobile unit operated from the blood donation center at Centenary, and Bossier City was proud
to be the recipient of this mobile unit’s very first trip when it stationed itself at Bossier High School on
January 11th, 1952. The visit was coordinated by V.V Whittington, president of the Bossier Bank and
Trust Company. By then the Red Cross had ended its policy to require segregated blood donations,
having done so by 1950. Following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Louisiana was the last state to overturn
blood segregation requirements in 1972.
If you have local World War II, medical history or other family photos or stories to share (we will also
scan and return originals if that is your preference), please visit or contact us at the History Center. We
are located at 7204 Hutchison Drive (formerly called 850 City Hall Drive) just across Beckett Street from
the old Central Library and History Center in Bossier City, LA. All Bossier Parish Libraries locations will be
closed Wednesday, 1/1/2025. Normal operating hours for Bossier Central Library and History Center are
M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-
[email protected]
For other local history facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB,
@bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.