The new documentary produced by WQED Pittsburgh, "Fly Boys: Western Pennsylvania's Tuskegee Airmen," was premiered by the University of Pittsburgh last Friday as part of its annual celebration of Black History Month. It is a blockbuster, a fine piece of work, and it pins perfectly an issue that continues to preoccupy Americans. That is, race.

"Fly Boys" is a magnificent presentation of a quintessential piece of American black-white relations. The basic story is that during World War II, black Americans wanted to fight along with white Americans against our Axis enemies, Germany, Japan and Italy. Some black Americans, including a significant number from Pennsylvania, wanted to join America's air forces.

The problem was that America's armed forces were segregated and black people weren't considered by the whites who ran the country and the armed forces to be smart enough, or, to put it more delicately, to possess the requisite technological skills, to operate aircraft.

But as the war wore on, the Air Force eventually formed the so-called Tuskegee airmen, a group of African-American men who were trained to fly and operate at least five kinds of warplanes and who then fought in the European theater against the Germans, with a very impressive success rate. They also incurred considerable loss of life. Their formal name as a unit was the 332nd Fighter Group of the 15th Air Force.

About 60 of the airmen were from Western Pennsylvania. Some are still alive and live among us, and they were honored Friday night by the University of Pittsburgh and WQED. Pitt and its chancellor, Mark A. Nordenberg, should be particularly commended for the university's annual activities surrounding Black History Month. I, for one, always learn something interesting from their efforts.

But the Tuskegee airmen's ability and combat record wasn't the end of it, by any means. These Americans were treated as inferior at home, discriminated against in housing, education, employment, access to facilities and in many other aspects of life. So it was remarkable that they actually wanted to fight and die to defend a society that treated them so badly. They could just as easily have wanted to see white-controlled society defeated and shattered in the ongoing world war. America had, in effect, reneged on the promise of a better life that they thought they had gained through the Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments.

The next predictable but obvious phenomenon was that during and after World War II the Tuskegee airmen were not prepared simply to return to the United States and accept again the segregation that prevailed there. They had just fought and died for their country. They had established clearly that they could fly and fight, with distinction. But then they came home and found, for example, that the pilots who had flown the P-51s, P-40s, P-47s, P-39s and PT-13Ds were not allowed to fly commercial aircraft -- clearly not because of any absence of qualifications.

So it turned out that there were two battles for the Tuskegee airmen to fight -- the one against America's enemies in the war, then the one against American racial segregation at home. The film, "Fly Boys," which will be shown in Pittsburgh on WQED-TV tomorrow night at 8 p.m., documents both struggles well. The fact that many of the stars of the drama and their families still live among us puts the icing on the cake.

But nothing is simple in this country, particularly in the area of race. I have to say that when the lights went on at the end of the film at the Soldiers and Sailors Hall, being white I found myself wondering not only what the African Americans present thought of what they had seen, but also what they thought of white Americans in general, not only for what the white majority had done at the time of World War II, but now, as well.

My evolution on the question of race is complicated. I come from a small southern Ohio town which, in terms of American attitudes toward race, was, in the words of the song, "above the below and below the upper." The student population of my schools was about 10 percent black, near the national average. I then spent a good part of my adult life in Africa and learned without a doubt that black Africans were easily as smart as anyone I had ever met anywhere.

One conclusion I also drew from my time in Africa was that American ideas of race are truly bizarre, in particular the idea that if someone visibly has even a little "black blood" in his veins he is black. Africans can't make any sense of that concept.

The Tuskegee airmen affair Friday night had another problematic aspect. One of the cohosts, WQED President and CEO George L. Miles, Jr. pointed out the evolution of affairs from the time of the Tuskegee airman to now, when an African American is one of the front-running candidates for president. I saw his point, but didn't like it. America will know that it is finally where it ought to be on race, and other personal characteristics, when candidates for president are measured on their intelligence, integrity and demonstrated capability to be president, not on their race, gender, sexual preference, religious faith, age or other single characteristic.

It is an achievement for America that a prominent candidate is an African American. But he should not be elected, or not elected, on that basis. His election would honor the Tuskegee airmen, or would it? They wanted to serve simply as pilots, gunners and mechanics -- not as African Americans. And having their unit limited to only African-American crew members was not their idea by any means.