He was a white man with Nazi tattoos. She was an 18-year-old black girl, protesting a Ku Klux Klan rally in her home town.
The story of how their two lives crossed is an incredibly human tale of kindness, selflessness and the ultimate respect for life.
It was 1996. Keshia Thomas had heard the KKK was in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
She decided to join a group of anti-KKK protesters. They had a special fenced-off area to voice their protest. When someone noticed the man on their side, mob mentality kicked in. “There’s a Klansman in the crowd,” a woman shouted from a megaphone.
The man, wearing a confederate flag T-shirt was kicked to the ground, and then the mob surrounded him.
“It became barbaric,” Thomas said, according to BBC Magazine.
“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’.”
That instinct led Thomas to throw herself to the ground, shielding the man from of a violent and angry crowd. A student photographer, Mark Brunner, was there. He started taking pictures of the incredible scene.
Why? Why would she do something for someone who represented the very thing she had been there to protest?
Why would she help someone who epitomized hatred, prejudice, evil?
Months after the incident, a stranger approached Thomas in a coffee shop. He said thank you. She asked why. He revealed himself to be the man’s son.
It caused her to reflect on the importance of what she had done.
“For the most part, people who hurt … they come from hurt. It is a cycle,” she told the BBC.
“Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad. How does the son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
This story originally appeared on News.com.au.