"The biggest thing you can do is just be kind to another human being. It can come down to eye contact, or a smile. It doesn't have to be a huge monumental act."
In 1996, a black teenage girl saved a man from a mob believing him to be a supporter of the racist Ku Klux Klan. Keshia Thomas was just 18 when the KKK held a rally in her hometown of Ann Arbor in Michigan. Ann Arbor being a liberal town as well as multicultural made it an odd choice for the KKK.
When the KKK arrived, a large number of the town's residents turned up to show that they had outstayed their welcome. It was a controlled, tense affair but when a member of the crowd spotted a white man wearing a Confederate flag T-Shirt and an SS tattoo on his arm among them, mob mentality took over.
The crowd chased the man down the street and began to attack him with the wooden placards they held.
"When people are in a crowd they are more likely to do things they would never do as an individual. Someone had to step out of the pack and say, 'This isn't right.'"
Thomas threw herself on top of the man in a moment of insane courage to protect him from the attackers. A student photographer, Mark Brunner, who witnessed the event said;
"She put herself at physical risk to protect someone who, in my opinion, would not have done the same for her," he says. "Who does that in this world?"
This one act of kindness, inspired many across the globe. A simple act, a human act, a moment of pure selflessness changed the life of a man that Thomas didn't even know.
"That some in Ann Arbor have been heard grumbling that she should have left the man to his fate, only speaks of how far they have drifted from their own humanity. And of the crying need to get it back.
Keshia's choice was to affirm what they have lost.
Keshia's choice was human.
Keshia's choice was hope."
Leonard Pitts Jr. The Miami Herald, 29 June 1996
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