Bad history, either way

Apparently Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee got into it over the lack of black troops in Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's rendition of the book about the Iwo Jima landing. As there were some 900 black troops on the island (mostly humping ammunition, as the Army was still segregated then, though the Marines weren't), it wouldn't have been difficult to put in a couple extras in the background and thus have avoided the whole issue. On the other hand (and just to be fair), that's less than one percent of the total number of troops on the island, so they'd have been sprinkled pretty thin...