Becoming a Tuskegee Airmen
In May 1941, just seven months before the United States entered World War II, the Army Surgeon General’s Office and the Selective Service issued screening guidance to induction station examiners. Any prospective serviceman with suspected or admitted “homosexual proclivities” was to be disqualified for possessing a suspected “psychopathic personality disorder.”[1]
During his mandatory appearance before the draft board in 1941, Oscar Kenney’s friend, Bernard Perlin, was among those who daringly decided to out themselves. “I didn’t want to go to war and fight, simply,” he later remembered. “And how do you not go to the war? You confess to being gay, period. So I prepared myself long before I was going to be called up. I went to a psychiatrist and got a letter declaring me ‘mentally unfit.’ It was shameful, but it was a means to an end.”[2]
Though Perlin was a working-class artist, his whiteness granted him a degree of social mobility and institutional trust that was largely out of reach for Black men. Yet the consequences of this strategic exposure quickly grew perilous. As a deterrent to young men claiming to be homosexual just to avoid military service, draft board records soon began to be “treated with only limited confidentiality.” A current or future employer could easily discover a man’s real or assumed homosexuality. The threat of being broadly stigmatized in their hometowns compelled many gay men to lie about their sexual orientation. Crucially, many did so simply because they truly desired to serve their country.[3] For working-class Black men, however, the stakes were elevated by the realities of Jim Crow, where a leaked record could mean complete unemployability or racialized violence.
For many Black draftees and volunteers, both straight and closeted, military service offered a chance to advance the wartime “Double V” campaign championed by Black civic leaders. By fighting for freedom abroad, these servicemen could help expose the hypocrisy of their being denied it at home.[4] But due to prevailing racist assumptions among military brass, 90–95 percent of Black service members were assigned to segregated labor and support units, thereby being denied the opportunity to prove their valor on the battlefield alongside white troops.[5]
But one unique program provided some measure of opportunity for selected candidates like Oscar. At the end of 1938, with tensions rising on the world stage, President Roosevelt had established the Civilian Pilot Training Program at colleges throughout the country to ready American flyers for war. Black pilots, however, were initially barred from this program due to a highly problematic 1925 study by the Army War College that had determined that Black soldiers were physically, mentally, and morally inferior to their white counterparts.[6]
In 1939, the National Airmen’s Association of America, an organization of Black pilots, and the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper, funded a “Goodwill Flight” from Chicago to Washington, D.C., as part of their advocacy for opportunities for Black pilots in the military.[7] Additional pressure from other Black newspapers, civil rights groups, sympathetic legislators, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt led to a provision being added to the Civilian Pilot Training Act of 1939 that banned racial discrimination in the program. Though still segregated, training programs were launched at six Black colleges, including the Tuskegee Institute. It was there, in January 1941, that the War Department announced the formation of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first all-Black aviation unit.[8]
Mrs. Roosevelt, who helped secure a loan from the Rosenwald Fund to build an airfield at Tuskegee, took one giant step further: into the back of a plane piloted by instructor Charles Alfred Anderson over nearby Kennedy Field, thereby publicly demonstrating her confidence in the competency of Black pilots and in this pioneering training program.[9]
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in a Piper J-3 Cub trainer with Tuskegee Institute flight instructors C. Alfred “Chief” Anderson and Director of Training Lewis Jackson, March 1941. Courtesy of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
While the flight program represented a monumental step forward, the entire training apparatus at Tuskegee remained strictly overseen by a white military command. Managing this rigid atmosphere was Director of Training (and ultimately Field Commander) Noel F. Parrish, who developed a reputation as a more benevolent figure who advocated for the desegregation and equal treatment of his Black flyers and personnel, and championed their capabilities.[10] The cadets brought to Tuskegee were all high achievers who had completed at least two years of college or passed intensive qualifying examinations. They underwent extensive ground school, physical conditioning, and pilot training toward their ultimate combat mission: to escort B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator heavy bombers, safeguarding them from enemy fire.[11]
The military’s weaponized concept of “moral inferiority” formed a dangerous double front for Black queer personnel. To shatter the myth of racial inferiority and prove their capabilities as pilots, the Tuskegee candidates—whether straight or gay—had to project a flawless image of hyper-masculine, patriotic respectability—leaving someone like Oscar with virtually no choice but to keep his private life completely hidden in order to serve.
The training was so rigorous that the Tuskegee program suffered an estimated 60% washout rate. Those eliminated early faced a sharp loss in status, often reassigned to Army labor or infantry units. The creation of the 100th, 301st, and 302nd Pursuit Squadrons in 1942, followed by the 477th Bombardment Group in 1944, however, opened up hundreds of vital technical and specialist support roles for these Black servicemen. Instructors, mechanics, meteorologists, air traffic controllers, radio operators, navigators, bombardiers, intelligence, and medical personnel all provided critical support to the pilots and their planes.[12] A substantial cadre of women further assisted the program as nurses, machinists, mechanics, parachute technicians, and administrative assistants.[13]
Notes
[1] Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 12.
[2] Schreiber, One-Man Show, 78.
[3] Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 20-23.
[4] “The Double V Campaign: Victory at Home and Abroad,” National Park Service, Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, June 24, 2024, nps.gov/poch/learn/historyculture/the-double-v-campaign.htm.
[5] Byron Greenwald, “Where Did All the WWII U.S. Army Black Combat Soldiers Go?” Dale Center for the Study of War & Society (blog), University of Southern Mississippi, September 15, 2021, dalecentersouthernmiss.wordpress.com/?s=greenwald.
[6] Alan M. Osur, Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II: The Problems of Race Relations (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force, 1986), 2.
[7] Amelia Grabowski, “How One 1939 Flight Helped Advocate for Black Military Pilots,” National Air and Space Museum (blog), Smithsonian Institution, May 22, 2025, airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/how-one-1939-flight-helped-advocate-black-military-pilots.
[8] “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Tuskegee Airmen,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, fdrlibrary.org/tuskegee.
[9] Jennifer D. Keene, “The First Lady Visits Tuskegee,” Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-first-lady-visits-tuskegee
[10] Greg Marshall, “Rice alum Noel Parrish: The Wind Beneath Their Wings,” Rice News, February 24, 2014, news2.rice.edu/2014/02/24/rice-alum-noel-parrish.
[11] Robert Goetz, “Tuskegee Airmen Blazed Trail of Excellence Before Civil Rights Movement,” Air Training and Education Command, February 9, 2010, aetc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/262248; Daniel Haulman, “Tuskegee Airmen,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, October 5, 2011, last modified July 23, 2025, encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/tuskegee-airmen/.
[12] J. Todd. Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 68-69.
[13] Stephanie Siek, “Women of Tuskegee,” National Association of Black Military Women, www.nabmw.org/women-of-tuskegee.