*-THIS IS A LONGER ONE THAN MOST, BUT IMPORTANT TO THE ISSUES FOCUSED ON IN
"SCIENCE FICTION" AND THE PURPOSES AND CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE, SO I'VE CREATED A SEPARATE PAGE FOR IT.
TO GET TO IT, TAKE YOUR NEXT FOOTSTEP HERE.
was refused admittance for the treatment his own work had
helped develop.
The story interested me in relation to my work about racial
discrimination and i mentioned it in a report encouraging that
action should be undertaken against apartheid a decade ago.
I thought little more about it until i saw a rebroadcast of that
"M*A*S*H" episode and the recommendations
started that i write a book about my work. As the book
would mainly consist of the texts of my reports and statements,
realizing Hollywood can be overly dramatic or outright dishonest
about things like this as can be politicians, i went to the
public library to look up the New York Times obituary of
Dr. Drew published in 1950.
In the process i recalled that well-known American blues singer
Bessie Smith also had allegedly died under the same
circumstances, and i decided to look for her 1937 New York
Times obituary also.
Curiously (given her enduring fame),* i found none for her. But
in the Encyclopedia Americana's listing for
Bessie Smith, it states that: "The story that her death
resulted from the refusal of a hospital to admit her because of
her race has been disputed."
And the April 2, 1950 edition of the New York Times notes
that Dr. Drew won the 1943 Spingarn Medal "for the
highest and noblest achievement by an American Negro" for his
World War Two work directing supplies of blood plasma to Great
Britain during the German blitz.
But what does it say about what the "M*A*S*H" episode
suggested?
It states that: "Dr. Charles Drew, an outstanding Negro
physician and pioneer in the field of blood plasma, was killed
in an automobile accident near (Burlington, N.C.)...(and) three
other Negro doctors were hurt when their car overturned."
One can only wonder if, some quarter of a century after the
incident (at which time the "M*A*S*H" episode was written
and broadcast), new evidence was discovered...originally not
known to the New York Times.
Or...
Time (if not always progress) moves forward (except in some
science fiction or in irrational minds), and the April 17, 1989
edition of Vancouver's Province newspaper contained the
following report, titled, "Grannie just left to die":
Those who sympathize with the oppressed non-whites in South Africa, while they are no doubt encouraged by the rhetoric of Pretoria that the country's new president, F.W. deKlerk, does plan to dismantle apartheid, for the most part may have forgotten or have never been told that it was deKlerk's National Party which enacted over 300 laws in that country specifically based upon racial discrimination. And in the period between 1978-88, spent $110 million spreading "disinformation" in Western democracies to persuade the naive it was dismantling apartheid--during which time it actually withdrew or modified only 5 of the apartheid laws.
*-THIS IS A LONGER ONE THAN MOST, BUT IMPORTANT TO THE ISSUES FOCUSED ON IN
"SCIENCE FICTION" AND THE PURPOSES AND CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE, SO I'VE CREATED A SEPARATE PAGE FOR IT.
TO GET TO IT, TAKE YOUR NEXT FOOTSTEP HERE.