The Kenney children, c. 1923. Left to right: John Jr., Elizabeth, Oscar, and Howard. Courtesy of the Kenney Family Archives, Atlanta.

Born on August 3, 1916, Oscar Armstrong Kenney was the product and namesake of a most extraordinary dual lineage.[1] His grandfather, William Oscar Armstrong, was a trailblazing politician who became the first Black candidate for state office in Massachusetts in 1891.[2] His mother, Freida Armstrong Kenney (1882-1949), was the first African American woman to graduate from the Sargent School (now Boston University’s Sargent College).[3] His father, Dr. John A. Kenney (1874-1950), was the founder and medical director of the John A. Andrew Hospital at the Tuskegee Institute, and the personal physician to pioneering agriculturist George Washington Carver and the institute’s principal, Booker T. Washington.[4]

The Tuskegee Institute had been founded in 1881 by Washington in Macon County, Alabama, to promote economic independence for young Black men and women by providing them with vocational, agricultural, and industrial training.[5] It was into this extraordinary setting, some three decades later, that Oscar and his siblings—elder brother John Jr., and younger brother Howard and sister Elizabeth—were born and spent their early formative years.

During Oscar’s earliest years in Tuskegee, Carver routinely took the Kenney boys on Sunday walks, stopping to learn the botanical names of plants. Dr. Kenney further enlisted his children’s help in his own garden. Music saturated Oscar’s childhood home, where his mother played classical records on the family Victrola.[6] While his brothers, like their father, would ultimately go on to illustrious careers in medicine, these early influences seemed to set Oscar on a career course in music and the arts.

His early childhood world was violently uprooted in 1922. After a new Veterans Administration Hospital was established at Tuskegee for Black World War I veterans, Dr. Kenney led the successful fight to fully staff it with Black medical professionals. In retaliation, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the Kenney family’s lawn. After a white patient tipped Dr. Kenney off about his imminent murder, he evacuated his young family northward to Newark, New Jersey within twenty-four hours.[7]

Oscar Armstrong Kenney (top right) with Boy Scouts Troop 20, Montclair, New Jersey, c. 1927. Courtesy of the Montclair History Center.

Because segregation laws in New Jersey—as in Alabama—prohibited African American doctors from practicing in white hospitals, Dr. Kenney used his own money to establish the Kenney Memorial Hospital in Newark in 1927. He also continued his prominent leadership within the National Medical Association, the first national organization of African American physicians,[8] and as a tireless advocate for civil rights. Speaking in 1930 to the Inter-racial Committee of Montclair, the nearby community in which he and his family had established their home, Dr. Kenney advocated for “closer cooperation and understanding between the races.” He continued, “Remember we are only a half a century removed from bondage. Now that we have physical freedom, we are striving for mental and spiritual freedom and equality.”[9] Dr. Kenney’s own parents had been freed slaves.[10]

Oscar attended South Side High School in Newark instead of Montclair High School, possibly due to his parents’ public campaign against local school redistricting, which they had alleged was an attempt “to segregate Negro children and children of foreign extraction.”[11] Oscar had already experienced similar systemic exclusion firsthand as an active member of Montclair’s Troop 20—a troop formed in 1927 out of necessity after the national Boy Scouts of America allowed local councils to exclude Black youth from white troops.[12] Yet he seemed to thrive at South Side—a racially and culturally diverse school—where he became a member of the student council and the tennis and track teams. In its weekly roundup of the school’s activities, the Newark Evening News made frequent note of Oscar’s performances as a singer. He sang for the school’s French Club, was a soloist at the annual “South Side Night,” and served as the vocalist for a jazz orchestra that performed between the acts of the school play, The Whole Town’s Talking.[13]

But one contemporary news item in the Newark newspaper presaged his ultimate destiny as a Tuskegee Airman: at a school assembly in January 1934, “Lieutenant Colonel George Vaughn of the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics, who rates second among the World War aces, told of some of his experiences.”[14] Oscar, who was mentioned in the same article for having announced a basketball game, was no doubt present.

Oscar Armstrong Kenney’s sophomore portrait from the 1941 Oberlin College Hi-O-Hi yearbook. Courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.

The five-year gap between Oscar’s 1934 high school graduation and his entry into college may be explained by the economic realities of the Great Depression: Dr. Kenney was only able to afford to send one of his children to college at a time. Consequently, while Oscar waited his turn, his brothers John Jr. and Howard staggered their undergraduate educations at Bates College in Maine.[15] Given the later evidence of his association with Bernard Perlin, it seems likely that Oscar attended art classes in New York City during this period. His Army Air Force records list his civilian occupation as “commercial art,” while his college records—with information supplied by his father—list it as “Floriculture and Art.”[16] These threads seemed to unite the creative world of his youth, blending his affinities for music and visual art with an appreciation for the natural world first sparked on his childhood walks with George Washington Carver.

Two years younger than Oscar, Perlin was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In 1935, at just sixteen, he moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Newark so that he could attend art school in nearby New York City. At the Art Students League, he immersed himself in a thriving multiracial subculture of young queer students, underground gay bars, and Harlem drag balls.[17] Perlin’s artistic dedication to capturing this diverse social landscape bridged his public and private work; during this exact period, his 1939 New Deal mural commission for the South Orange, New Jersey, post office sparked controversy for its depiction of Black and white neighbors laboring and learning in a unified space.[18] While his private drawings from this era provide a similarly vivid visual memoir of his own broader community, images of Oscar were among the rare photographs he kept, suggesting a closer connection that may have begun in Newark and continued in New York. Supporting this link, a photograph of a portrait drawing by Perlin, made in New York and dated 1940, indicates that Oscar had returned to the city and visited Perlin during a school break.[19]

In the spring of 1939, Oscar had studied piano theory and ear training in a special program at Juilliard’s Institute of Musical Art,[20] likely in preparation for his entry that fall into the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College in Ohio. By choosing Oberlin, Oscar was following in the footsteps of his trailblazing grandfather Armstrong. He was also entering an institution with a proud abolitionist legacy, famous for being the first U.S. college to admit both men and women of all races and for thereby attracting a progressive student body.[21]

Oscar Armstrong Kenney (top right) and fellow members of the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association, an organization supporting educational exchange with China, in 1941. Courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives.

By December of that year, Oscar proved that he shared his grandfather’s pioneering spirit by becoming the founding president of the Opera Guild at Oberlin. “It was started by Oscar Kenney, a negro boy who is a freshman in the Conservatory,” noted The Oberlin Review. “He has always been interested in opera and rounded up some other students who were interested also.” The group convened weekly to listen to the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon broadcasts and to study opera scores and recordings, with hopes of staging a production themselves. Oscar led his fellow Guild members in soliciting funds for the Met’s campaign to build a new opera house in New York.[22]