A Korean War-time History for National Blood Donor Month

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.

World War II was the first war in which the banking and transporting of blood products to battlefields and military hospitals saved countless lives, when physician-scientist Dr. Charles Richard Drew developed new and practical methods to separate blood plasma, which, unlike whole blood, had a shelf life of two months. He also developed infrastructure like stateside community donation centers in store fronts, factory floors and “bloodmobiles,” and the know-how to ship blood products overseas and onto battlefields and field hospitals, no matter how remote.

World War II was also the time 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. However, blood collected there was intended for homefront use by local hospitals, and was banked in case of a regional emergency.

The American Red Cross (ARC) collected blood for wartime military use at collection centers in major cities – not Shreveport or Bossier. The nearest centers during World War II were the blood banks in Dallas and Fort Worth, opening in 1945. By the time of the Korean War, the ARC’s collection for military use did expand to Northwest Louisiana and was temporarily located in 1951 at Barksdale Air Force Base. By early 1952, the ARC’s Ark-La-Tex blood collection efforts were anchored by a “Defense Blood Center” in the science building at Centenary College in Shreveport.

From this Defense Blood Center in Shreveport, a mobile blood donation unit operated within a 100-mile radius throughout the Ark-La-Tex. In fact, post blood-drive statistics often showed that the amount of blood collected was often inversely proportional to the size of the community where the blood mobile stopped, when smaller communities, like Daingerfield TX or Plain Dealing LA collected the most pints. Bossier City, however, was proud to be the recipient of this mobile unit’s very first trip, when it was stationed at Bossier High School on January 11, 1952. The visit was coordinated by V. V. Whittington, president of the Bossier Bank and Trust Company, who recruited the Bossier Bearkat football team to recruit as many fellow students, and teachers, as possible.

The February 1, 1953, Shreveport Times reported that the mobile unit of the blood center was also recruiting donations from the students and staff of Bossier City Colored High School, later known as Charlotte Mitchell High School. Principal Jack Strong pledged to be the first in line from the school. Although the American Red Cross had ended its policy to require segregating blood by race by 1950, it did not disallow the practice in states like Louisiana, where segregation was the norm in schools and elsewhere until as late as the early 1970’s.

For the Shreveport blood drives, many promotions were used to entice people to come to the donation center, such as using popular musicians through the Shreveport-based Louisiana Hayride radio show, or an appearance by the Wilson and Company six-horse hitch demonstration team of Clydesdales. Despite the papers’ reports of the enthusiasm generated for the early blood drives, especially at high schools and colleges like Centenary, as well as certain workplaces, the March 25, 1952, Shreveport Times reported that the amount of donations at both the center and through the blood mobile did not reach capacity. The donor recruitment chair for the region urged people to contact Shreveport’s Defense Blood Center to make an appointment by pointing out that the center had no blood to send to aid the victims of tornadoes that had ripped through six southern states the previous week. Though the Defense Blood Center’s priority was to provide blood to the military, the center’s secondary function was to have a stockpile of blood plasma available for use in “widespread civil emergencies.”

One exceptional drive was promoted in the December 21, 1952, Shreveport Times with an announcement that on December 29th, donors with Type O blood (the universal donor type) were asked to donate by the ARC southeast region headquarters in Atlanta in order to have their blood flown in refrigerated containers to Travis Air Force Base near San Franciso. The containers would then be transferred to a waiting Military Air Transport Service plane to take off immediately for Korea.

Normally, blood donations from Shreveport were separated for its plasma, which has a much longer shelf life than whole blood (2 months versus one week). Plasma is invaluable in many trauma situations, but some needs weren’t adequately met without whole blood. Normally, whole-blood donations were taken from donors on the west coast, eliminating some of the travel time for the perishable blood. However, at that moment, the need for whole blood by American troops in Korea was greater than what could be provided on the west coast alone.

In contrast, the Shreveport Times of August 6, 1953, reported that the need for blood had decreased following the Korean Armistice Agreement, which was signed July 27, 1953, and that Shreveport’s Defense Blood Center would close at the end of the month. The paper reported that a total of 36,454 pints of blood had been collected by the center from 30 parishes and counties since December of 1951.

If you have local Korean War, 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 in the Bossier Central Library Complex at 7204 Hutchison Drive in Bossier City, LA. Please note the new hours for the History Center: M-Fri 9-6. Saturdays we are open by appointment. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

For other local history facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB and @bplhistorycenter on TikTok.

Images: Centenary Conglomerate, February 20, 1952. Centenary College of Louisiana Archives and Special Collections

Article by: Pam Carlisle

A Civil Rights History for National Blood Donor Month

 

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-center@bossierlibrary.org

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/.

Images: 

• Charles R. Drew, MD postage stamp, 1985, courtesy of the National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
• “American Blood for British Air Raid Victims,” 8 January 1941. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center Howard University, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Charles R. Drew Papers. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/101584649X42.
• Blood Drive sponsorship, The Planters Press, 1 February, 1945.

Article by: Pam Carlisle