When the US entered World War II in 1941, Americans were called to do their part for the war effort. Factories shifted production to weapons, families rationed food, and ordinary people were urged to donate blood for wounded soldiers. But for African-Americans, even this patriotic act came with rejection and humiliation. When they stepped forward to donate blood, they were turned away by the American Red Cross, which barred “Negro blood donors,” claiming that Black blood was not suitable for white soldiers.
From Slavery to Jim Crow
This policy did not emerge in a vacuum. It was the product of centuries of racism in America. Even though slavery had officially ended in 1865, its legacy lived on. The rise of Jim Crow laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries cemented segregation in every corner of society. African-Americans were forced into “separate but equal” institutions, though the reality was always separate and unequal.
By the 1940s, segregation was so ingrained that it seeped into medicine itself. The rejection of African-American blood donations reflected the same racist assumptions that had long been used to justify slavery and segregation: that African-Americans were inherently different, inferior, and unfit to be placed on the same level as Whites.
The most bitter irony is that the man who revolutionized blood preservation was African-American himself: Dr. Charles Drew.
Dr. Charles Drew was a brilliant African-American physician whose research into storing and processing blood plasma changed the world. His innovations made it possible to preserve blood for long periods and transport it across oceans, which was exactly what the Allies needed during the war.
Because of his groundbreaking work, Drew was appointed to lead the blood bank program for the American Red Cross in 1941. In other words, the man who designed the system to save thousands of lives was African-American, yet his own blood, under Red Cross policy, would have been deemed unacceptable to mix with White donors.
Drew pushed back hard against these policies. He knew there was no scientific justification for rejecting the blood of African-Americans and called the practice “unscientific and insulting.” But the Red Cross and the U.S. military held firm, bowing to racist public pressure. Frustrated, Drew eventually resigned as director. His departure highlighted the hypocrisy at the heart of the program: a nation that relied on an African-American man’s expertise to save its soldiers but refused to acknowledge the equality of African-American blood.
After Drew’s resignation, African-American blood was accepted, but only if it was stored separately from White blood, and hospitals were instructed not to mix them.
This separation carried no medical value. It was a symbolic act that reinforced the idea of racial hierarchy, even in life-saving science.
The irony stretched further: while African-American blood was being segregated at home, African-American soldiers were being segregated abroad.
During World War II, the U.S. military remained racially divided. Black troops often served in separate units, were commanded mostly by White officers, and were frequently relegated to menial or support roles rather than front-line combat. Even when they fought and bled for their country, their service was undervalued.
Thus, the same system that kept African-American blood apart from White blood in hospitals also kept African-American soldiers apart from White soldiers on the battlefield. Both reflected the deep contradictions of a nation claiming to fight for freedom while denying it to millions of its own citizens.
Today, the segregation of blood donations is rarely mentioned in mainstream accounts of World War II. It is a forgotten chapter that shows how deep racism ran in America, so deep it extended into the very blood in the veins of African Americans.
Sources:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/events-programs/events/128158-color-blood-charles-r-drew-md-phd
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/desegregating-blood-a-civil-rights-struggle-to-remember
https://www.westernhealth.com/wha-blog/dr-charles-drew-the-blood-bank-pioneer-who-transformed-medicine/
