Loving Those You Do Not Dare
Oscar Kenney’s student file at Oberlin College contains a typewritten excerpt from a letter he wrote from Tuskegee to Lydia Lord Davis, his former faculty advisor, on February 24, 1942, while likely participating in preliminary flight training there through the Civilian Pilot Training Program. “Busy as I am I’ve still missed Oberlin very much,” he confided to Mrs. Davis. “But it’s strange how remote it all seems. I almost feel it is another ‘world’ entirely, a peaceful oasis surrounded by a world that is fast being catapulted to destruction. But I do feel that if there are enough places like Oberlin scattered over the world there is a chance for some of the things we love most to survive the terrific metamorphosis that is taking place.”[1]
Oscar’s official enlistment in the Army Air Corps was recorded on July 28, 1942, at Gunter Field in nearby Montgomery, Alabama. Initially slated for training as an airplane mechanic,[2] he persevered through the pilot program to earn his wings and a commission as a second lieutenant on June 30, 1943. A day later, he was assigned to the 318th Headquarters and Air Base Squadron and further attached to the 1155th Single Engine Flying Training Squadron.[3] Along with his fellow Class 43-F graduates, he then began fighter transition training at Tuskegee.
The rest of his class would soon move north to Selfridge Field in Michigan to serve in either the 100th, 301st, or 302nd Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group before deploying to Italy that winter.[4] But his own journey would end here.
Oscar Armstrong Kenney (front row, third from right) with Class 43-F at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, 1943. Courtesy of the Air Force Historical Research Agency.
On July 9, 1943, “Oscar Kenney’s plane plummeted into the ground,” remembered fellow Airman Harry Sheppard. “No one ever knew why.”[5] Indeed, Oscar’s fatal crash mystified investigators, who puzzled in the accident report over how a routine practice flight by a now-seasoned pilot and commissioned officer could have gone so awry. Witnesses described the plane, a Curtiss P-40E Warhawk, “as coming straight down with the engine running,” striking the ground vertically “with such terrific force that it made a hole approximately fifteen feet deep and thirty feet wide.” Given the complete wreckage of the plane, the accident committee could not determine if “material failure” had caused the crash, so instead suggested that Oscar had perhaps been unsuccessfully attempting a variety of maneuvers.[6]
“While former comrades, flying overhead, dipped their wing-tips in tribute, last rites were held in the Tuskegee Institute Chapel . . . for Lt. Oscar A. Kenney,” described an obituary published in the prominent newspaper The Afro-American. During the service, Chaplain Harry V. Richardson “urged that the sadness of the hour be replaced with thoughts of the beauty of the young officer’s life and the nobility of his sacrifice. In these . . . will be found the strength and inspiration needed to achieve the hopes for which he died.” Oscar would no doubt have appreciated the musical tributes provided by the Tuskegee Institute Quartet and the Girls’ Chorus of the school’s choir, after which a three-gun salute was fired and Taps was played.[7]
After the funeral, Oscar’s parents sent each of his classmates a letter “urging us to perform our patriotic duty,” recalled Harry Sheppard, “so that Negro people could share fully in the freedom for which we were fighting.”[8]
Dr. Kenney then channeled his grief into his public advocacy for the advancement of Black civil rights. He wrote a long requiem for Oscar, sending a copy to the Oberlin Alumni Association for its magazine and arranging to have it published in the September 1943 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association. A colleague, Dr. H. A. Callis, noted the tragic timing of the piece. “Dr. Kenney’s bereavement is the more tragic,” Callis noted, “in that the July number [of the journal] carried an editorial plea from Dr. Kenney’s pen, seeking fair treatment for America’s jim-crowed millions. For this America our young men give still, the last full measure of devotion.” Black newspapers across the country, such as The St. Louis Argus, also published it, while Dr. Kenney had it printed and further distributed as a pamphlet.[9]
Privately, Dr. Kenney reworked some of his eulogy for Oscar into a poem he titled, “Oscar Is Gone.” In one remarkable stanza, however, he loosened his earnest description of Oscar’s heroism to wrestle with another possibility for his son’s fatal “accident”:
Did you give up your fight, dear Oscar?
Was it too hard living a different kind of life,
loving those you do not dare, cannot share?
Yes, life can be cruelly unfair –
Too many wars to fight on land and in the air.[10]
What was Dr. Kenney insinuating? Had Oscar’s accident actually been an accident? Had it been the result of an unfortunate miscalculation or of a calculated act? And in employing a variation of the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”—a famous euphemism for homosexual love that arose from a poem by Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas—was Dr. Kenney acknowledging that his own Oscar’s orientation might have played a role in his tragic death?
The pressures on Oscar must indeed have been tremendous to bear. Just three months earlier, his colleagues in the first flying unit of the 99th Fighter Squadron had departed Tuskegee for Italy, becoming the first Black pilots deployed to fight in the war. On July 2, while escorting B-25 bombers on a raid over Sicily, Charles B. Hall became the first African American pilot during the war to shoot down a German aircraft. But also on that day, two fellow Tuskegee Airmen were lost in combat; several others had already perished in training accidents.[11] His own direct participation in the war was about to become very real.
Meanwhile, a different sort of spotlight had always followed him: he was the son of a prominent father who commanded deep respect both locally and nationally throughout the Black community. His father, Dr. Kenney, had returned to head the Tuskegee Institute Hospital in 1939, remaining in that leadership role throughout the period Oscar was training nearby, while his mother, a lifelong partner in her husband's work, served as president of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club.[12] Beyond Tuskegee, Oscar’s siblings were all pursuing advanced degrees. John Jr. and Howard were studying medicine at Howard University and Meharry Medical College, while Elizabeth was attending graduate school for social work at Columbia University.[13] Given this backdrop of family achievement and ambition, Oscar surely would have understood the devastating social damage a potential blue discharge could inflict upon his family’s distinguished reputation.
Yet they likely would have rallied behind him, for the Kenneys were “accepting of everything and everybody,” according to longtime family friend and Tuskegee historian Barbara Dunn-Harrington. Indeed, her recollections closely mirror those of Oscar’s great-niece, Lisa Aikens, who remembered her late mother, Linda Kenney Miller—a close friend of Dunn-Harrington—mentioning talk that Oscar may have been gay.[14] But in 1943, the consequences of being publicly outed would have posed considerable hurdles to his own artistic ambitions.
In his interviews with Allan Bérubé and Arthur Dong, Bruce Lee conflated certain technical aspects of the “accident” that had killed his Tuskegee boyfriend. But the shared timing of his presence at Tuskegee (he was then a cadet in Class 44-B) and the fact that Oscar’s crash was the only such incident recorded there during that period suggest that he was likely discussing Oscar Kenney. He also stated that his paramour had “just gotten his commission,” as Oscar indeed just had.[15] Bruce refrained from naming him, explaining that the man’s “brothers asked me not to say anything.”[16] In one unguarded moment in those recordings, however, he spoke of “loving Kenny.”[17] While five Tuskegee Airmen were named Kenneth, all of them survived the war.[18] This strongly suggests that Bruce was actually speaking of Oscar Kenney.
Upon learning of the fatal crash, Bruce realized that he could not publicly grieve without it causing suspicion. “I stopped living for a while,” he later reflected,[19] and adopted an aunt’s advice that “the strong, the silent heart takes his grief aside where none may see.”[20] Just weeks after Oscar’s death, Bruce deliberately washed out of the aviation cadet corps, later telling Bérubé that he had done so “because my roommate was killed, and I didn't want to fly.”[21] An academic report for his class substantiates this timing: after having completed pre-flight training and ground school, Bruce Lee began his actual flight instruction at Moton Field in Tuskegee on July 28, 1943, but on August 17th he “failed to complete the prescribed course of instruction because of flying deficiency.”[22]
Bruce was then assigned to the Intelligence Library, where his commanding officer “was a gay man, and immediately the gay community which was there started moving in on me.” He continued, “I got mash notes on my bed and had a lot of people sit on my bed at night.” Bruce remembered these men as being kind and unthreatening, though fearfully he never joined in with them, despite being advised he could gain entry into Officer Candidate School if he was “nice to certain people.”[23] “Did I want to [risk being] in that British cadet’s uniform walking down the street?”
Ultimately, Bruce’s commanding officer—a fellow Black man—told him he loved him. When Bruce rebuffed him, denying that he was queer, the officer benevolently replied, “‘Who are you fooling? I just hope that when it does happen to you, that somebody will be as kind to you as I'm trying to be.’”[24] Bruce never forgot the compassion of this man, who “realized what was going on in my life.”[25]
For Bruce had already experienced a tentative, yet tragically unfulfilled, first love.
Notes
[1] Oscar Kenney to Lydia Lord Davis, February 24, 1942, Box 139, Alumni and Development Records, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.
[2] Oscar A. Kenney, "United States, World War II Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946," July 28, 1942, Record Group 64, National Archives and Records Administration.
[3] “Personnel Orders No. 27,” June 19, 1943, Headquarters, Army Air Forces Southeast Training Center, Maxwell Field, AL; “Special Orders No. 165,” June 26, 1943, Headquarters, Tuskegee Army Air Field, Tuskegee, AL; “Special Orders No. 170,” July 1, 1943, Headquarters, Tuskegee Army Air Field, Tuskegee, AL; all digitally supplied by CAF Rise Above, Red Wing, MN.
[4] “Charles E. McGee,” CAF Rise Above, September 7, 2017, cafriseabove.org/charles-e-mcgee/. Multiple other biographies on the same website confirm that Oscar’s classmates moved on to Selfridge Field.
[5] Holway, Red Tails, 111.
[6] War Department, U.S. Army Air Forces, “Report of Aircraft Accident, Tuskegee Army Air Field, July 16, 1943,” Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL.
[7] “Planes Salute Lt. Kenney at His Funeral,” Afro-American (Baltimore, Maryland), July 24, 1943,17.
[8] Holway, Red Tails, 111.
[9] John A. Kenney, "Oscar Is Gone," introduction by H. A. Callis, Journal of the National Medical Association, September 1943, 173-74; Oscar Is Gone (privately printed pamphlet, 1943), Papers of John A. Kenney, Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, AL; "Doctor Writes A Eulogy To His Son: A Flying Cadet Who Was Killed While In Training," St. Louis Argus, July 23, 1943, 8.
[10] Kenney, “Oscar Is Gone.”
[11] Joseph Caver, Jerome Ennels, and Daniel Haulman, The Tuskegee Airmen: An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2011), 162-63.
[12] “J.A. Kenney Dead,” New York Times; “Mrs. John Kenny [sic], Wife of Doctor,” Newark Evening News, May 3, 1949, 49.
[13] “John Kenney ’42”; "Howard Kenney Dies: Physician, Official at VA," Washington Post, February 12, 1996, B04; John A. Kenney, “Auto-biographical Sketch.”
[14] Barbara Dunn-Harrington, telephone interview with author, February 17, 2026; Aikens, email.
[15] Lee, interview by Dong, June 17, 1993.
[16] Lee, interview by Dong, March 12, 1993.
[17] Lee, interview by Bérubé, May 28, 1980.
[18] Daniel Haulman, “Tuskegee Airmen Pilot Roster,” CAF Rise Above, cafriseabove.org/the-tuskegee-airmen/tuskegee-airmen-pilot-roster.
[19] Lee, interview by Bérubé, May 28, 1980.
[20] Lee, interview by Dong, March 12, 1993.
[21] Lee, interview by Bérubé, May 28, 1980.
[22] “Academic Report, Class No. 44-B,” Headquarters, 66th AAF Flying Training Detachment, Moton Field, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, October 2, 1943; digitally supplied by CAF Rise Above, Red Wing, MN.
[23] Lee, interview by Bérubé, May 28, 1980.
[24] Lee, interview by Dong, March 12, 1993.
[25] Lee, interview, February 19, 1993.