Episode 2: How Two Stories Became One

UNHEALED: A Story of Race, Memory, and a Teaching Hospital
Episode 2: How Two Stories Became One
Transcript

Music: theme from MASH

Dr. Damon Tweedy: It's been a long time since I've heard that song.

Dr. Jeff Baker: So, for our listeners under a certain age, that's the theme song to one of the longest running TV shows that I can remember, MASH. So back when I was a Duke medical student, I used to watch its reruns while eating frozen dinners. It was about a crazy field hospital in the Korean War where the heroes were kind of anti-heroes. They were unshaven, they wore T-shirts and Army fatigues, and they spent most of their time just cracking jokes about the establishment. It was a comedy, often in pretty bad taste, but it had a lot of social commentary. Here's an example where the doctors are talking to an injured white soldier who is in need of blood.

          MASH Recording:
          Doctor: How are you doing?

          Soldier: Okay, doc.

          Doctor: Okay. Not about this, but we need another unit of plasma.

          Soldier: For me?

          Doctor: We got a special this week. Take in a pint of blood and we give you six free highball glasses that break easily.

          Soldier: Hey, make sure I get the right color of blood, hey Doc.

          Doctor: Huh?

          Soldier: I wouldn't want any of that darkie stuff here.

          Doctor: Oh yeah, sure.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Actually, it's one of the few episodes that I still remember. As I'm sure you picked up, it was about this white soldier who wanted to be sure that he didn't get blood from a black person. And in the course of the episode, the doctors played a trick on him, painting his face with brown shoe polish while he was asleep to make him think that he had somehow been given some of that wrong blood.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Painting a white character's face? That sounds cringey man, and like something that could not fly on primetime TV today.

Dr. Jeff Baker: I don't think it would. But as MASH so often did, the episode closed on a serious note. Let's go back to our soldier.

          MASH Recording:
          Soldier: Hey, what are you guys trying to do to me? Did you give me the wrong color of blood or not?

          Doctor: All blood is the same. Didn’t you hear about Dr. Charles Drew, soldier?

          Soldier: Who's that?

          Doctor: Dr. Drew invented the process of separating blood so it could be stored in plasma. He died last April after a car accident in North Carolina. He bled to death. The hospital wouldn't let him in. It was for whites only. See you, fellow.

Dr. Jeff Baker: So that I have to say was the very first time that I heard of Dr. Charles Drew, the celebrated black doctor who is known as the father of the blood bank, who in fact really had died in a car accident in April, 1950. That story hit me hard. I'll never forget it.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: You'd never heard of Dr. Charles Drew before that TV episode?

Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, I don't think so. It sounds like maybe you had?

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Absolutely. Very few people have medical schools named after him like Dr. Charles Drew does.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Well, as absurd as that MASH episode was on one level, it opened my eyes to an important figure in black history and in fact American history.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Let's take a moment here to introduce ourselves before we go any further. I'm Damon Tweedy, psychiatry professor at Duke, and author of the book, Black Man in a White Coat, and this MASH fan sitting across from me that you've been hearing from, that's Dr. Jeff Baker. He's a pediatrician and historian here at Duke.

Dr. Jeff Baker: This is the second episode of our podcast UNHEALED, where we're looking at medical racism through the lens of local history. More specifically, we're going to take a deep dive into a story that involved Duke Hospital and its hometown of Durham, North Carolina, a story that most people have forgotten.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: So what Jeff is referring to is the 1950 death of 24-year-old World War II veteran and college student Matheus Avery, who was turned away from Duke Hospital after a car accident because all of the beds for black people were full.

Dr. Jeff Baker: And who had died after having been turned away. So if you heard our first episode, you're probably though wondering why we're starting off by talking about the death of Dr. Charles Drew. Hang tight. There's a reason for this. These two stories have uncanny similarities. Both took place in 1950, both involved catastrophic car accidents within a few miles of each other, in central North Carolina. Both men were taken by ambulance to the same hospital in Burlington, and both men ultimately died. And of course, both were black.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Yes, the similarities really are striking, but there's one big difference. Charles Drew was famous, especially among black people. Maltheus Avery was not. In the decades following their tragic deaths, Drew's story has been told many times, but Avery's story was forgotten, outside of his family.

Dr. Jeff Baker: And forgotten I might add here at Duke, until the historian Spencie Love rediscovered Avery of the course of her own research into the death of Charles Drew. That's why we have to start Avery's story actually with Drew's story, which turns out to be a lot more complicated than the story on MASH. So we're calling this episode how two stories became one. So Damon, let's go back to what you knew about Charles Drew before we started this project.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: So I first heard about him in black magazines like Jet and Ebony growing up, and then I think I saw a segment on TV about him at some point. So he was one of a dozen or so people whose name came up during Black History Month every year, you know, to inspire the young black kids to imagine achieving great things in this country, even if the country wasn't always so great to us. And as we're about to discuss with Dr. Charles Drew, his life was a great example of both.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, as we said, he's often called the father of blood banking. He showed that you could store blood a lot longer if you separated the red cells from the plasma. Now this was a breakthrough that saved thousands of lives in World War II.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: And it led the American Red Cross in 1941 to appoint him head of its wartime blood transfusion program.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Which was ironic since the Red Cross still segregated its blood by race.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Exactly. Had Drew needed a blood transfusion from the Red Cross, he could only receive blood from a black person, which sounds so crazy in retrospect.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Beyond crazy.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: And Drew, he knew was absurd even in his own time. He was furious that he couldn't ever get this policy changed, and that's what prompted him to resign in protest. So he went on to become the head of surgery at Howard University Medical School in Washington, DC and he was a renowned mentor and educator to many young Black medical students and residents. In fact, in the 1940s, more than half of all Black surgeons in the US had trained under Charles Drew. That's an amazing fact; think about it. He was probably the most famous Black doctor in the country at the time.

Dr. Jeff Baker: So after the war, he was in Washington, DC. Why did he die in North Carolina?

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Again, it's all kind of connected to his role as a really prominent medical educator and professor. So on the night of April 1st, 1950, Charles Drew was driving with three other Black doctors from Howard to speak at an annual medical conference in Tuskegee, Alabama. So you’ve got to remember, these are the days of segregation and Jim Crow, right? And there weren't really motels. It was hard for black people to find places to stay. I'd heard family stories about relatives who would drive all night or they would stop on the side of the road and sleep. Think how unsafe that is now. You think about just stopping on the road and how that's a safer alternative than staying in a hotel. But that was certainly the times in which they lived. And so Charles Drew was making that drive, the all night drive that so many people did in that era. And it was just as the sun was coming up in the morning when Drew actually fell asleep at the wheel here in North Carolina.

And so his car flipped over. He was thrown out and the full weight of the car struck him. So that obviously sounds really terrible. If you can just think about how devastating that must have been. So an ambulance was called and they took Charles Drew and the others in the car to Alamance General Hospital, which is in Burlington. It's about an hour or so west of where we are here today. At the time, it was primarily a white hospital. It's a small hospital, and they had a very, very tiny Black ward in the basement. So it was a segregated hospital, very much consistent with the times. And that's where Drew actually died. And the news of his death spread nationally pretty quickly, as did this rumor that Drew had actually been refused blood by the white doctors who had treated him—a rumor that soon became accepted as fact.

Dr. Jeff Baker: It's just an absolutely horrible tragedy and really the perfect illustration of Jim Crow America.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: And it's so ironic, right? The father of the blood transfusion, this advocate of equal healthcare, he's the one that's refused blood in his hour of need because of his race?

Dr. Jeff Baker: It's such a powerful story. It hits you on so many levels. There's just one thing. It didn't happen—at least not to Dr. Drew, not according to one of the doctors who was with him in the car and at the hospital.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Well, that's not what I'd always heard about Drew's death.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Yeah, pretty much everyone believed that Charles Drew died because he was denied treatment because he was black. For years and years, the story was used to illustrate just how unjust and unequal our health system was.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: So here's a quote from Whitney Young, who was then head of the National Urban League, an influential civil rights organization of the day, writing about Drew's death several years later.

          Voice-over, Whitney Young: Dr. Drew was critically injured and losing blood rapidly. His colleagues flagged down a passing car and rushed him to the nearest hospital. At the door he was turned away. It was a whites only institution. By the time he was taken to a nearby Negro hospital, Dr. Charles drew, the man who developed the theory of blood plasma and pioneered the blood bank, had bled to death.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: The story that Charles drew was denied care because of his race was widely accepted, even by members of his own family. And in the years after his death, the civil rights era brought us plenty of other Black martyrs of white racism. Think Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, the four girls from Birmingham's 16th Street
Baptist Church, and many, many more, including of course Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So there was no reason to doubt the story about Dr. Charles Drew—until there was.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Okay, so here's what happened. One Sunday morning in 1982 while finishing up their morning coffee, Spence Love, who was a journalist who had turned historian, and Garrett Epps, a law student from Duke, and her husband at the time, came across a newspaper story that caught their attention. I'll let Garrett Epps tell us what happened.

          Professor Garrett Epps: Spencie was looking for a subject to do a thesis on, and we both came across an item in the Greensboro News and Record, and it was an interview with two of the doctors who had been in the car with Charles Drew when he had the fatal accident and who had been transported with him to Alamance Hospital and who were very, very clear and very definite and very specific about what had actually happened. It was by this point, it had entered the history books, it was being taught in schools and so forth, that Dr. Drew had bled to death
because a white's only hospital would not allow him to be admitted. And that simply wasn't true. And I think the doctors who had been with him were very concerned. They wanted people to know that Drew had been treated like the famous doctor that he was, that everyone black or white involved in that incident and the treatment, knew exactly who he was, and that they tried as hard as they could to save his life. His injuries, as you know better than I, were just such as he could not survive.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Spencie Love was intrigued. She had been a journalist and for her, the contradictory reports did not add up. So she started digging. Here she is on The State of Things and WUNC Radio in 2008.

Archival audio, Spencie Love, Ph.D.: When I first set out to do the research to write about Charles Drew, I wanted to find out what had really happened, because the legend, as I now call it, the Drew legend, was alive and well. If you ask most people who had heard of Charles Drew, they almost always said, oh, wasn't he that black doctor who bled to death, that black doctor who has refused treatment? That is still the case today, despite many attempts by many people to debunk the legend. I found out very quickly about Drew's treatment. And he was in shock; he never was conscious after the accident. He died from internal injuries, internal bleeding. However, I learned that everybody in the community still believed, even though the hospital was still there and the people who doctors were still alive and had been telling the truth about treating Drew, many people in Alamance County where he died, still believed that Drew had been refused treatment and had bled to death. So my quest was why do people continue to believe this?

Dr. Jeff Baker: Spencie tried to track down anyone who might have clues regarding where they had first read that Drew had been refused treatment. And she finally had a big break when she talked to the publisher of Durham's black-owned newspaper, The Carolina Times, who was adamant that her own father, who had then been the newspaper editor, had written an editorial condemning the white doctors who had refused to treat Charles Drew. Spencie looked, and in fact she couldn't find any such editorial. So she went to the archives and combed every single issue of The Carolina Times, week by week, for the whole of 1950, until, in an issue printed over six months after Drew's accident, she finally found an editorial that did in fact feature a front page article and photo of a Black man who had been refused treatment at a local hospital. But it wasn't about Drew. In Spencie's words:

          Archival audio, Spencie Love: It led me to the story of Maltheus Reeves Avery, a young black man from Henderson, North Carolina, who was driving through Alamance County on December 1st, of 1950, the same year.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Maltheus Avery was a World War II Army veteran and college student at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro. He was on his way home for the weekend to see his pregnant wife and their small daughter in Henderson, North Carolina. On Highway 70 in Alamance County, not that far from where Dr. Charles Drew had his own accident, Maltheus Avery's car was struck by an oncoming truck. He was rushed to Alamance General Hospital, the same hospital that Dr. Drew had been taken to just eight months before, literally eight months to the day. But they didn't have the resources there at that hospital to treat such a badly injured patient, because Maltheus Avery had a severe head injury and he needed to see a neurosurgeon. And so Maltheus Avery…

          Spencie Love: …was transferred 30 miles away to Duke Hospital, where he was refused treatment because the black beds were all occupied, and even though there were white beds available. Avery, also known as Sunny to his family, was then taken to Lincoln Hospital, which was the Black hospital in Durham at the time. That was another 10-minute drive.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: He died in the ER just minutes after he arrived there.

Dr. Jeff Baker: What became clear to Spencie was that the Drew story had become confused or conflated with the Avery story in people's minds. So now came an even harder task, how to track down the Avery family. Here's Garrett Epps describing that process.

          Garrett Epps: She went to Henderson. All she had was Maltheus Avery's name. She began looking through old records. She found an address where the family had lived. They weren't there then. She went to that address. They weren't living there. She began asking neighbors, do you know where the Averys went? And finally, at some point, somebody gave her the name and contact information for Waddell Avery.

Dr. Jeff Baker: This was a breakthrough. Waddell Avery was one of Maltheus' two younger brothers. He saw himself as the family historian and quickly embraced Spencie's desire to tell the story of his older brother. So she spent many hours recording interviews with Waddell, and we're going to hear some of those conversations later on. Spencie put a lot of what she learned into her book called One Blood, the Death and Resurrection of Charles Drew, where she went into detail about how the two stories of Drew and Avery merged over time into one dramatic tale in the public's imagination.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: So the idea behind Drew's death that a Black person could be denied care and die as a result, was undoubtedly true, even if not in his case specifically.

Dr. Jeff Baker: Yes, and it captured a profound truth of the African-American experience. Black people in the Jim Crow era had all heard stories of people being denied medical care because of their skin color.

          Archival audio, Bessie Smith (singing): When you’re down and out, not one penny. And my friends, I haven’t any…

Dr. Damon Tweedy: That's the voice of Bessie Smith, the famous blues singer of the 1920s and thirties who died after a car accident in Tennessee in 1937. Soon after her death, a story circulated in a music magazine that she had bled to death after being denied care at a local white hospital. It was a powerful story, so powerful that in 1948, famous author JD Salinger wrote a short story based on that version of events. And a decade later, playwright Edward Albee used the same story as the basis for a one act play called The Death of Bessie Smith.

Dr. Jeff Baker: But like with Charles Drew, this version might also not be accurate. Now no one knows for sure what happened, but at least according to a biography published 30 years later, Bessie Smith was not in fact denied medical care. Her injuries were simply so severe that it was not clear that she could have been saved. Now, Damon, we weren't there and we just don't know. But most historians and biographers today think that she probably was given medical care.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Looking back, I think it's clear to see how activists at that time latched on to the tragedies of Charles Drew and Bessie Smith. I mean, these are famous Black people, and the idea that they could be cast aside in their hour of need, really showed how terrible of a country America was for Black people then and why change was so desperately needed.

Dr. Jeff Baker: And the truth is that what was alleged to have happened to Drew and Smith did indeed happen to Black people throughout America in those years. After all, this was the era of whites-only hospitals, and those that treated Blacks often did so in segregated, second-class fashion.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Here's just one example that took place the same year that Charles Drew and Maltheus Avery died.

          Voice-over (from The Untouchables, Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1951): On August 27th, 1950, three victims of an auto accident were denied beds in Breckenridge County Hospital, Hardinsburg, Kentucky because the establishment had no facilities for colored people. They were left lying on the floor of the emergency room for three hours. Their wounds were untended. The only medication given them was morphine. One of the men died on the floor, and ironically, his family later received a bill for services rendered. The others were removed to Louisville General Hospital where they eventually recovered. One sustained partial permanent paralysis as a result of a broken back.

Dr. Jeff Baker: That's tough to listen to, especially if you think about how many other stories like it, stories of ordinary people, how many stories like that have been forgotten.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: You know, we owe Spencie Love a lot of gratitude for bringing Maltheus Avery’s story to public light. But if I'm being honest, when I first heard her whole version of debunking the Charles Drew legend, I didn't really feel, didn't sit that well with me, if I'm going to be honest. What's the point of all that? It kind of felt like we were doing this revisionist history and kind of whitewashing the past, making it seem like it wasn't as bad as it really was. But how's that going to help things move forward?

Dr. Jeff Baker: That's a really important point.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: Yeah, I think so. But I've also come to recognize that without Spencie's effort into researching Charles Drew's death, it's very unlikely that either one of us would ever have heard the name Maltheus Avery.

Dr. Jeff Baker: And the Avery story is important because it's actually about us. Unlike the Drew story, it directly involves Duke Hospital. We can't just dismiss it as a story that took place somewhere else far away. We've got to own it.

Dr. Damon Tweedy: In the next episode, we'll learn about Maltheus Avery the person, and about his family. We'll see how the events at Duke Hospital altered the lives of those closest to him forever. I'm Damon Tweedy.

Dr. Jeff Baker: And I'm Jeff Baker. Thanks for listening.

UNHEALED was produced by the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at Duke School of Medicine. Our producer is Beverley Abel. Keith Weston is mix engineer. Our project manager is Nikki Vangsnes. Marjorie Miller provided project assistance. Music by Blue Dot Sessions in Pond Five. Funding has been provided by the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and Duke Institutional History Project. Our website is unhealed.duke.edu.