In 2012, the Star Wars creator, George Lucas, released his pet project: Red Tails, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African Americans who fought in the second world war. Doug Melville assumed it would mean that his great-uncle, Benjamin O Davis Jr, would finally gain the recognition he deserved. “I was invited to a screening and he was set to be the main character in the movie, played by Terrence Howard,” Melville recalls, via Zoom from home in New York. “Then, when the character came on the screen, he had a different name. “I asked who had...