Word: jima
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When it comes to history, Spike Lee isn't one to duck a fight. Last spring the New York filmmaker set off a nasty public showdown with Clint Eastwood, whom he criticized for not depicting African-American soldiers in his recent World War II films about Iwo Jima...
...novel by James McBride, to give long-overdue attention to the role of African-American soldiers in World War II. While at work on it, Lee took a swipe at Eastwood over the absence of black soldiers in his historical epics Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The Californian director fired back: "A guy like that should shut his face," to which Lee replied, "The man is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either...
Earlier this year, Spike Lee picked a fight with Clint Eastwood over the lack of black soldiers in Eastwood's Iwo Jima films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Clint opined that "a guy like that should shut his face"; Spike replied, "The man is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either." No doubt that Lee was voicing a social grievance, but he was also tub-thumping some early publicity for his own WW II film - the one with the John Wayne clip and the typically smoldering Spike Lee quip...
Racial prejudice shunted blacks into supply roles on Iwo Jima, but that didn't mean they were safe. Under enemy fire, they braved perilous beach landings, unloaded and shuttled ammunition to the front lines and weathered Japanese onslaughts on their positions. "Shells, mortar and hand grenades don't know the difference of color," says Thomas McPhatter, an African-American Marine who hauled ammo during the battle. "Everybody out there was trying to cover their butts to survive...
...Flags of Our Fathers zeroes in on the soldiers who hoisted the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi. None of the six servicemen seen in Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph--the iconic image depicts the second flag-raising attempt; the first wasn't visible to other U.S. troops on Iwo Jima--were black. (Eastwood's other film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is told largely from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.) Eastwood is also correct that black soldiers represented only a small fraction of the total force deployed on the island...