Charles Drew bust by artist Inge Hardison

I spied the bronze bust on a top shelf as I approached the stall in the antiques mall, but forgot it as soon as I entered and headed to see what was in the back of the stall.

Maybe I was looking too cursorily at items in the various stalls because I had just left an estate auction in a retirement community that had offered little worth buying. The owner had died last year, and the family had taken what it wanted and put the house up for sale.

So, I wasn’t expecting to find much at this place where vendors rent stalls to sell their merchandise. Until my auction buddy Janet mentioned the bust of Charles Drew. She was astounded to find a bust of this great African American doctor in so unlikely a spot on a highway in South Jersey. It seemed so out of place, she repeated.

I realized that it was the same bust I had forgotten to examine. Thank goodness she had the presence of mind to do so. Had I looked at the label on the stone base I would have instantly recognized who he was:

Charles Richard Drew
(1905-1950)
He found a way to save lives by saving blood.

I turned the bust to its back to see if it was signed, and it was: Inge Hardison, 1967. On the bottom was a narrative about Drew, who was actually born in 1904, and his contributions:

When someone needs blood for a transfusion, his doctor simply telephones the local blood bank, and the proper blood type and quantity is there in minutes. Only 25 years ago that simple phone call would have been impossible.

It was not until 1941 that Dr. Charles Drew, then Director of the British Blood Plasma Project, introduced the revolutionary idea of a blood bank. As the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank, he supplied much-need plasma to the United States Armed Forces.

But it was not only in the banking of blood that Dr. Drew made his mark. In the 1930’s as a professor and head of surgery at Howard University Medical School, Dr. Drew trained and encouraged hundreds of young doctors. Under his strong and inspired leadership, the enrollment at Howard soared.

Shortly after the war, Dr. Drew was named surgical consultant for the United States Army. Then, a year later, his career was brought to a halt by his death in an automobile accident.

Dr. Charles Drew left an enduring mark in many fields. He had been an outstanding athlete and coach, a magnetic speaker, an inspiring teacher and a dynamic administrator, a gifted scientist and above all, a skilled surgeon.

Memorials and monuments are unnecessary, for that simple phone call for blood serves as a reminder of the important contributions of Dr. Charles Richard Drew.

The last line bore an inscription: Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 86 Proof, The Old Taylor Distillery Co., Frankfort and Louisville, KY.

The bio left out Drew’s resignation from the Red Cross over the military’s policy of first, requiring that blood donated by African Americans be segregated and then, requiring that it be used only for African American soldiers. His later consultant work with the U.S. Army was with a team sent to Europe after the war to analyze health care.

A tag on the bust at the auction mall – apparently printed by the stall’s owner – described it as an anodized bronze plaster bust. Others from the series were described on the web as an anodized plaster bust with bronze finish. This sculpture had large chunks of stone missing on the two back edges of its base, a small chip in front and two above the left eyebrow.

Inge Hardison was Ruth Inge Hardison, an African American artist who died in in 2016 at age 102. The limited-edition plaster busts were commissioned by Old Taylor in 1967 as part of a promotional campaign.

It was one of more than a half-dozen busts in a series on black inventors and innovators titled “Ingenious Americans.” They were selling for $5 each and were very popular, with buyers waiting at least eight weeks to receive one, according to a 1969 newspaper article. The company expanded its production facilities to keep up with the demand.

A company executive called it “a frustrating kind of success. All we can do is ask our friends to be patient and promise them that the bust will reach them eventually.”

The works made the cover of the February 1967 issue of Negro Digest, which featured an article about them and Inge Hardison. The article mentioned that only three had been made and she was selling cast stone versions for $20 each.

Before she became a sculptor, Inge Hardison was a Broadway actress and photographer who also wrote poetry (several of her poems were published in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine in 1938).

She specialized in sculpting heroes of African American history as well as common folks. In the early 1960s, she created a series of cast-iron sculptures titled “Negro Giants of History” that included such major names as Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King, Mary McLeod Bethune and Sojourner Truth. Others of her works were installations at various places in New York. In 1983, Inge Hardison sculpted a group of figures titled “Our Folks,” a homage to everyday people.

“It was great to meet all those people,” she says in a YouTube video feature by Howard Thompson. “There I was in the face of these people. Oh, that was marvelous.”

In 1990, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo presented Nelson Mandela with a two-foot sculpture of Sojourner Truth that had been created by Inge Hardison.

Inge Hardison was born in Portsmouth, VA, in 1914, and her parents moved to Brooklyn, NY, hoping for a better life that did not include segregation and discrimination. She debuted on Broadway in 1936 as Topsy in “Sweet River” in an adaption of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She also appeared as part of the ensemble in “The Country Wife (1936)” and as a replacement/alternate for the character Stella in the all-black “Anna Lucasta (1946),” along with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

She auditioned for the role of Prissy in “Gone with the Wind” but lost out to Butterfly McQueen because her face didn’t “look comic” for a role that was made for a comedic actress.

Inge Hardison sculpted busts of six of her fellow cast members in the play “What a Life,” and the pieces were displayed in the lobby of the Mansfield Theater.

She was also a photographer; among her subjects was Eleanor Roosevelt. She took music and creative writing courses at Vassar, studied at the Art Students League of New York and graduated from Tennessee State Agricultural and Industrial College (currently, Tennessee State University).

As a student at the college, she sang soprano with the Concert Singers, and joined them in performing for Tennessee Day at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Later, she gave a concert to raise tuition for a student at Tennessee State.

Inge Hardison posed as a model for artists at the Art Students League and other places, and while taking a break she’d handle the clay herself. She found that she enjoyed it and realized that she could do this herself, she says in the video. She worked in wax, clay, plaster and bonded bronze.

In 1962, a 16mm black and white film titled “Hands of Inge” – narrated by Ossie Davis – shows her at work on a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The 10-minute film, which focused primarily on her hands, was said to have been shot early in her career.

Inge Hardison was a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, formed in 1969 and aimed at “defining and promoting cultural achievement of black people.” Her papers from the academy (from 1970-1972) are at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.