On Tue, 2 May 2006 16:44:03 +0000 (UTC), Roy Smith wrote:

Marty wrote:
Tuskegee Airmen (shows how "bleached" my history books were)

I'm glad somebody mentioned this. Perhaps not as much great footage
as some of the others, but a story that's worth being told.

There was a recent BBC documentary about these Airmen. Incredible men, all
of them. Determined not just to be capable, but to be the absolute best.
Their war record speaks for them, it's a shame that the society they lived
in at the time was so racist that the mainstream press and the armed forces
could not bring themselves to honour these men as they deserved.

It has resonances with the story of Carl Brashear. The Navy didn't want to
see a black diver succeed. The film history of his life was overplayed and
somewhat distorted, but the "oral history" that Brashear himself recorded
shows the essential truth of what it was like to be black, talented and in
the armed forces during WWII and the subsequent cold war.