Untold History
By Charles Rush
February 9, 2003
Acts 11: 1-20
happened to be watching the BBC shortly after the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry. They had shown a picture of the astronauts on board and were briefly describing just how accomplished they all were. There was an American woman, an Israeli, an African-American pilot, a woman from a rural village in India that had come to our country for graduate school, and the other very able astronauts. They were all in a row smiling. They were all so on top of their game. The commentator said something about all of them and concluded, “Only in America”. It caused a lump in my throat. There is something about the diversity of our country that has encouraged excellence in all of us that is noble in a way the founders of our republic could not have anticipated.
“Only in America”. Last spring, I was having a pint
with some of the other visiting scholars at Cambridge university in one of the
local pubs. The subject was American television which is fast losing market
share. You may know that the most popular television show world wide is
American. You know what it is? Yes, Baywatch. I apologized to my colleagues for
our notorious export. One of the fellows from Russia said, “Why apologize?” But
certain American shows apparently don't sell over seas because they are
unbelievable. One of them is E.R.. What, I wanted to know, is not believable
about E.R.? One German said, “the way that Chinese, Indians, African-Americans,
and Europeans interact with each other and seem to know each other so well.” It
was something I had never noticed, though I'm sure I would partly agree with
him. But for so much of Europe, the idea of interacting with people from
different ethnic groups is simply not part of their experience and they have a
hard time believing that it can be part of ours to the degree that it is.
Right now, as you know, the Supreme Court is about
to review the Bakke decision on affirmative action policies for our colleges
and universities. I'm not going to comment on this case as such, but one thing
that has emerged as a consensus opinion all across the political spectrum is
that diversity has been a net good for our educational system. Unquestionably,
for me, one of the most moving things about teaching at Rutgers University were
the students I had whose parents had emigrated to our country. Some of them
were the first generation to attend college in their families. They came from
modest means, their parents sacrificing a great deal to get them to college. I
had a couple kids that had no idea how smart they were. But there they were
soaking up new ideas on Western Civilization. In many of my classes, there was
no majority group, it was that diverse. Literally ten nations would be
represented and a host of other ethnicities from our country. I loved the
exchange of ideas. I loved the idea that somehow, someway they all felt like
they belonged. It was a microcosm of the Garden State and it was very moving.
The year after the Twin towers were attacked, the
New York Times ran the pictures of every one who died that day with their names
underneath. No question, one of the things you couldn't help but feel was
gratitude for the sheer number of people from different countries all of whom
had come to our great City to follow a dream, yearning as Lady Liberty says,
“to breathe free.” It has made us stronger, better, more mature.
Even though it is very indirect, I find it so moving
because it is like a parable of the coming Kingdom of God. It reminds me of the
elevated passages of Isaiah that in those latter days, “all of the nations
shall flow up to my holy mountain.” And in those days, neighbor will not have
to ask neighbor how to follow God because “I will write my law upon their
hearts.” In those days, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation” but “I
shall teach them the ways of peace.” The idea of harmony in diversity, the idea
of celebration in peace, the idea of understanding in fellowship is such a
noble spiritual ideal.
That idea is what we really lift up in February with
the emphasis on Black History. We do that to celebrate, belatedly, the
important contributions and the ways that we have grown because of the impact
that African-Americans have had on our country in shaping our community. We are
intentional about that today because until recently we implicitly or explicitly
adopted two approaches to the historical contributions of African-Americans.
The first approach was ignorance. Certainly this
would be true of my youth in the South. We never learned about any
contributions that African-Americans made because, implicitly or explicitly in
the South, anyway, Black people weren't important. And there are a number of
small examples of things we never heard about.
“In at least one branch of industry, America owes
its supremacy to an African American, Jan Ernest Matzeliger. A pioneer in the
art of shoemaking, he enriched America and other nations by billions of
dollars, made a dozen or more millionaires, created work for hundreds of
thousands, and contributed enormously to what is regarded as one of the
distinct features of civilization, namely, the wearing of shoes. With no other
capital but his meager wages, he was forced to make use of such material as he
could get hold of. He used mainly pieces of wood and old cigar and packing
boxes. For six months he toiled strenuously until he had constructed a model
which though crude, gave him confidence that he was on the road to success.
Four years later he perfected a machine that would work. He was offered $1,500
for his invention of pleating the leather around the toe, which sum he refused.
Greatly encouraged by the widespread interest his model created, he started to
build a better one. With his new model it was easy for him to convince
practical men that his invention would work successfully. A company was formed,
consisting of himself, those who had advanced him money from time to time, and
some others with large capital. With this new invention, the United Shoe
Machinery Company rapidly drove competitors out of the shoe business until, a
few years later, it controlled 98 percent of the shoe machine business. A
tremendous expansion in the shoe industry followed. Shoe stocks proved a gold
mine for investors. Earnings increased more than 350 percent and the price of
footwear decreased. Matzeliger died in obscurity in 1889”.[i]
Obscurity is too bad because our country was built
on the ingenuity of inventors and Mr. Matzeliger made an important contribution
that every one of us takes advantage of every day.
If one understanding of African-American history was
ignorance, the other was, until recently, irony. Here I lift up the example
of Charles Drew. Charles Drew was born
in 1904 in Washington, D.C., the oldest of 5 children to parents of modest
means. In many ways, Charles Drew is a living model of the American Dream.
As a child, his biographer says that his sister
contracted tuberculosis for which there was no cure at the time. Night after
night, he listened to her cough. Day after day, he watched her health decline
until she finally died. Many years later, he would say that it was the impact
of his sister on his life that made him want to become a physician and heal
people.
Charles Drew was an outstanding athlete and he won a
football scholarship to Amherst University. At the time, Amherst was one of the
few competitive colleges in the country that was accepting Black students in
any numbers. He ran track and became an All-American football player (hard to
believe today that Amherst ever had a real football team).
For a couple years after college he was Athletic
Director at Morgan State College, but he decided to pursue medicine. At the
time, that was a daunting task for an African-American in our country, so Drew
entered McGill University in Canada, arguably the finest institution of higher
learning in Canada. He graduated 2nd in his class and did his
residency in Montreal before returning to teach pathology at Howard University
in Washington.
He won a Rockefeller Foundation grant and went to
Columbia University where he became interested in the early studies of blood
plasma, largely due to the influence of one of his Med school professors, John
Beattie, who was one of the first people to use blood transfusions to save life
during surgery.
He finished course work and wrote his dissertation
on the banking of blood, a technique whereby blood could be stored for later
use. Until that time, the limit on blood storage was two days.
Dr. Drew's research led to two important
discoveries. The first was a method of separating red blood cells from the
blood plasma, refrigerating both separately for longer term storage. The other,
was the observation that in certain cases, it was sufficient to simply give
patients blood plasma transfusions and those could be done across blood types,
enabling a much wider ability to tranfuse. He became the first African-American
to receive a doctorate of Medical Science from Columbia in the late thirties.
His research drew the attention of the authorities
in England, since war was breaking out across Europe. He helped the English
devise and establish their first nation-wide blood bank.
Likewise, our government asked him to direct the
establishment of a blood bank which he did. Fortunately, the blood bank was
operational in December, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The
blood bank was responsible for saving the lives of countless soldiers, not only
in that battle but throughout the course of the rest of the war.
Dr. Drew was the operational director for the Red
Cross until the War Department of the United States government issued a
directive to segregate the blood taken from Whites and Blacks. Dr. Drew
resigned in protest.
He won many honors in his profession. In the spring
of 1950, he was traveling to a medical conference in the deep South when his
car lost control and crashed. Dr. Drew was killed instantly but many people
noted at the time that had he required emergency treatment, he might have been
denied a life-saving blood transfusion at a White hospital since he was an
African-American in the segregated South. Imagine the irony of dying when the
life saving technique you developed was denied you because your race was not
worthy of mixing blood. Indeed the irony was so great that the story circulated
widely that Dr. Drew had been denied emergency treatment and the story was even
published in Time magazine.
Beyond ignorance, beyond irony, our generation needs
to begin healing the past by celebrating the considerable accomplishments of
African-Americans to the rich tapestry that is our cultural heritage on its
best days. Dr. Drew is a hero for the many barriers that he transcended that
stood in the way of his peers. He is a hero for the contribution that he made
to medicine, to the compassion that his invention brought to the soldiers of
his generation. Indeed, there is probably not a person here today that has not
directly benefited from his research. He is a reminder that on our best days,
it is possible for us to judge others, as Dr. King used to say, on the content
of our character rather than on our race or creed.
Amen.
[i]
http://www.black-collegian.com/african/aaprofil.shtml#mat
© 2003 .
All rights reserved
