
The teenager who saved a man with an SS tattoo - fredkelly
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24653643
======
acjohnson55
That's a beautiful story. There's something really powerful about standing up
for people who you'd be totally justified to let rot. I think we'd be in a
much better place as a species if this kind of reaction was more commonplace,
especially in this time of hyper-overreaction. An eye for an eye leaves the
whole world blind.

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kn0thing
That woman is a redditor and actually chimed in on the reddit thread in the
TIL community earlier today:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2al3cv/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2al3cv/til_that_at_a_1996_kkk_rally_in_ann_arbor/cixg55k)

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Crito
Commendable even without the neo-nazi angle. Jumping into an angry mob to save
the victim of their aggression is incredibly dangerous. You risk the mob
turning on you as well.

I don't know if I'd have the guts to do it.

~~~
nnq
I'm not trying to diminish the greatness of her gesture, but she really was
shielded from the "You risk the mob turning on you as well" part by two very
simple facts: her skin color and being a young woman... kind of hard to
imagine a young afro-american woman as being pro-KKK and to mob linch her too
:)

~~~
fredkelly
That may or may not be the case (I'm not sure mob mentality makes those
distinctions), I can't imagine anyone making those judgements in the heat of
the moment.

It's a truly commendable act.

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product50
I have noticed that Reddit's TIL subreddit (reddit.com/r/todayilearned) is
becoming a source of lot of non tech articles on Hacker News including this
one.

~~~
fredkelly
I'm actually an ex-pat so the BBC is part of my routine, I've now bookmarked
TIL though :)

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kochb
Living in Ann Arbor, it is rather odd to hear about a protest getting violent
in an otherwise open minded community that is as liberal and far left as San
Francisco. Mob mentality.

Not the same context as the article, but as an example the protests can get
rather fervent and loud:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3orPtIGyUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3orPtIGyUw)

~~~
vinay427
Also in Ann Arbor, can confirm that this is definitely very odd. The blanket
hate on GMOs stemming from Monsanto is disappointing, though, given their
importance in reducing famine in many areas (among other uses). This does
explain the "Stop Monsanto" scribbled on a stop sign near where I live,
though.

~~~
mtinkerhess
I grew up in Ann Arbor and remember when this rally happened. I wasn't at the
event but I remember a lot of people being really angry that the Klan was
speaking. I also remember there was a group of people that took non-violence
training and attended the rally with the intention of preventing violence. If
I'm remembering right my parents took my and my brothers to a counter-protest
about a mile from the main protest downtown.

At the time the Klan was mostly a historical organization that you learned
about along with the civil rights era in school -- they weren't an especially
powerful organization in 1996. But that was 19 years ago, and so the history
was 19 years more recent than it is today. And there were rumors of KKK
activity happening in nearby Howell, so the protest wasn't purely symbolic --
it felt closer to home than that.

Ann Arbor has a habit of taking to the streets. When we went to war with Iraq
in 2003 almost my entire high school skipped class to protest downtown. When I
visited over Thanksgiving I caught this one going down the street:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2MN6G0m8is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2MN6G0m8is)

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rmason
It may not be well known outside the state but the small town of Howell which
is less than thirty miles from Ann Arbor was a Northern center for Klan
activity. Robert E. Miles was a grand dragon in the Klan and I remember he
regularly held events at a farm along with ritualistically burning crosses
which frequently made the news.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Miles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Miles)

Most of the original followers of Miles have passed away but Howell still is
unable to shake its Klan past.

[http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-
arbor/index.ssf/2014/03/a_tale...](http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-
arbor/index.ssf/2014/03/a_tale_of_two_towns_newest_rac.html)

