Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School was incorporated in the State of California as a private, nonprofit educational institution in 1966[3] in response to the McCone Commission's recommendations to improve access to healthcare in South Los Angeles following the Watts Riots in 1965.

[8] Medical students complete their first two years of medical school at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, then finish their last two years of clinical work at Charles R. Drew University, including rotations at the Martin Luther King Jr Outpatient Center as well as local community clinics near the Charles R. Drew University campus.

[10] The school was the first comprehensive nursing program to open in Southern California in decades, and the first ever of its kind in South Los Angeles.

[21] In 2024, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science received a $75 million gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies to support the school’s endowment.

[22] [23] The university offers degrees in three colleges: Research at CDU focuses on ways to address health disparities within the state of California, nationally, and globally.

Faculty members at CDU conduct ongoing NIH and DoD-funded research on conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, tobacco use and HIV/AIDs.

[41] MEDEX students at Drew received their instruction from physician faculty at UCLA until March 1973, when they moved to what was then known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. General Hospital in Watts.

[41] In September 2017, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $800,000 to CDU to fund two residency training programs in Family Medicine and Psychiatry.

[30] By 2006, several residency programs had to be terminated because they lost accreditation for not meeting the necessary amount of oversight, and the hospital itself was forced into a radical restructuring plan in late 2006.

[57] Notable past and present Charles R. Drew University faculty members include Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist and the first black female doctor to receive a medical patent, for inventing a laser treatment for cataracts [60] and Deborah Prothrow-Stith, a pioneer in addressing youth violence as a public health issue and the first woman Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.