Aftermath
At the war’s end, Bruce Lee received his honorable discharge and promptly left Tuskegee for the University of Michigan. He would ultimately earn a B.S. in zoology, an M.S. in biology, and a Ph.D. in malacology (the study of mollusks), although midcentury racial barriers prevented him from ever working in his chosen field. He instead had a successful career in government service, with positions at the Library of Congress and later the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services). He married and fathered five children, though he was long divorced and living in Berkeley, California, when, at age fifty-two in the early 1970s, he finally came out as gay.[1]
Bernard Perlin designed now-iconic propaganda posters for the American war effort before becoming a war artist-correspondent for Life magazine. Just after the war, he exhibited his portrait drawing of Oscar Kenney alongside his likenesses of queer literary legends E. M. Forster and W. Somerset Maugham in his first one-man gallery exhibition in New York. In 2009, he included his portrait of Oscar in his very last show, held in a gallery just a few doors down from the queer-historic Stonewall Inn.[2]
More than one million African American men and women served in every branch of the American armed forces during World War II.[3] Among them were the 992 Tuskegee Airmen, who flew with immense bravery in over 15,000 missions in Europe and North Africa during their two years in active combat. They earned over 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses.[4] Every one of those pilots, along with each of the 14,000 men and women—whether military or civilian, Black or white—who served the “Tuskegee Experience” in a supportive capacity, is now considered to be a “Documented Original Tuskegee Airman.”[5]
But despite proving their extraordinary worth, the Tuskegee Airmen were met with far less than a hero’s homecoming. With institutionalized racism and segregation still rampant in the United States, it would take decades for their record to be officially recognized and celebrated.[6]
The groundwork for that hard-won recognition was laid during the war itself. In 1945, more than one hundred African American officers with the 477th Bombardment Group were arrested in Indiana for staging nonviolent protests against segregated officers' clubs, bringing systemic military discrimination into the national political spotlight. Faced with pressure from the Black press, civil rights groups, and members of Congress, the War Department reduced the majority of the court-martial charges against the Freeman Field Mutiny defendants to administrative reprimands.[7]
While officers fought pervasive bias on military bases, enlisted men faced life-threatening dangers simply trying to return home. The catalyst for significant postwar reform occurred after U.S. Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard, traveling home from his wartime service, was brutally beaten and blinded by police in South Carolina. This and other incidents of violence toward returning Black servicemen outraged President Harry S. Truman. “My forebears were Confederates,” he declared, “but my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.” Vowing “to end evils like this”—but further motivated by needing Black votes to secure his presidential reelection—Truman formed the interracial President's Committee on Civil Rights. On July 26, 1948, over the objections of senior military leadership, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which mandated equality of treatment and opportunity in the U.S. Armed Forces.[8]
Lesbian, gay, and bisexual military personnel would have to wait until 2011 to be able to openly serve, after Congress repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that had been implemented in 1993. Since then, they have been allowed “to serve the country they love without hiding who they love.” This new act has also provided for the review and correction of the military records of personnel who received “less than honorable” discharges solely due to their sexual orientation.[9]
Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, however, are currently prohibited from serving in the U.S. military due to an executive order signed by President Donald J. Trump in January 2025.[10] His predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had overturned a previous “transgender exclusion policy” enacted during the first Trump Administration, stating in a White House news release that "America is stronger, at home and around the world, when it is inclusive. The military is no exception.”[11]
This tension between policy reversals and institutional inclusion has also reached beyond military readiness into the online curation of the nation’s own history. In early 2025, the Pentagon ordered a mass removal of “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) content from its public websites and social media channels. This purge led to the temporary removal of pages honoring the Tuskegee Airmen and other minority war heroes, until a public outcry prompted their restoration.[12]
While digital tributes remain vulnerable to the stroke of a political pen, physical monuments can offer an enduring—if not entirely invincible—defense against historical erasure. On the relatively insulated private campus of Oberlin College, Oscar Kenney’s name is one of dozens cast in bronze relief on a World War II memorial wall. Above them, a quotation from the school’s wartime president, Ernest Hatch Wilkins, urges passersby: “It is not enough just to remember . . . . Their lives in a sense will continue as they are fulfilled through you.”[13]
Oscar Armstrong Kenney, Tuskegee Airman, shortly before his death at just twenty-five. Courtesy of the Kenney Family Archives.
Notes
[1] “Lee, Charles Bruce (Phd),” “Shellers from the Past and the Present,” Conchology, August 2015, https://www.conchology.be/?t=9001&id=23194, accessed February 2025 (biographical text since heavily truncated/revised on live site); for his coming out statement, see Lee, interview by Dong, June 17, 1993.
[2] Bernard Perlin, Bernard Perlin: May 24 through June 12, 1948, exhibition pamphlet (New York: Knoedler, 1948); opening night photographs of the portrait of Oscar Kenney at Bernard Perlin: A Retrospective (exhibition, Chair and the Maiden, New York, 2009), Bernard Perlin Archive, Chicago.
[3] Tyler Bamford, “African Americans Fought for Freedom at Home and Abroad during World War II,” The National WWII Museum, February 1, 2020, nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/african-americans-fought-freedom-home-and-abroad-during-world-war-ii.
[4] “War Service,” CAF Rise Above, cafriseabove.org/the-tuskegee-airmen/tuskegee-airmen-history/war-service/; “Tuskegee Airmen,” History, November 9, 2009, last modified May 28, 2025, www.history.com/articles/tuskegee-airmen.
[5] Theopolis W. Johnson, “Tuskegee Experience,” Tuskegee University, tuskegee.edu/legacy/TuskegeeExperience1.pdf.
[6] “Returning Home,” CAF Rise Above, cafriseabove.org/the-tuskegee-airmen/tuskegee-airmen-history/returning-home.
[7] John Curatola, "The Freeman Field Mutiny," The National WWII Museum, February 15, 2023, nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/freeman-field-mutiny.
[8] Jerry Mitchell, “On This Day: Truman Abolishes Racial Discrimination in U.S. Military” Mississippi Today, July 26, 2024, mississippitoday.org/2024/07/26/1948; Daniel L. Haulman, “A Short History of the Tuskegee Airmen,” Keep the Spirit of '45 Alive, October 22, 2015, spiritof45.org/A%20Short%20History%20of%20the%20Tuskegee%20Airmen.pdf; Harry S. Truman, Executive Order No. 9981: Desegregation of the Armed Forces, July 26, 1948, General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11; National Archives, archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9981.
[9] “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Resources,” U.S. Department of Defense, www.war.gov/Spotlights/Dont-Ask-Dont-Tell-Resources.
[10] “Understanding Trump’s Trans Military Ban,” Advocates for Trans Equality, transequality.org/resources/understanding-trumps-trans-military-ban.
[11] Jim Garamone, “Biden Administration Overturns Transgender Exclusion Policy,” U.S. Department of Defense, war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/2482048.
[12] Sebastian Starcevic, “Pentagon Admits to Mistakes in Campaign Against 'DEI' Content,” Politico, March 21, 2025, politico.com/news/2025/03/21/pentagon-anti-dei-campaign-images-027205.
[13] "OAM-WWII Memorial: The Names," Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Fall-Winter 1996-1997, www2.oberlin.edu/alummag/oampast/oam_fallwin_9697/oamfallwin96_names.html; Anne Palmer, "[Oberlin] World War II Memorial Garden," Traces of War, tracesofwar.com/sights/138914.