just a lil fun irony for anons
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mississippi-teen-hailed-hero-helping-rescue-girls-officer/story?id=86300178
Mississippi teen hailed as hero after helping rescue 3 girls, officer from river
"I was just like, 'I can't let none of these folks die.'"
A 16-year-old boy is being hailed as a hero after he helped rescue four people when a car drove off a boat launch and into a Mississippi river.
The incident happened Sunday at around 2:30 a.m., when the car, which had three teenage girls inside, drove into the Pascagoula River in Moss Point, floated about 20 feet away from shore and started sinking, the Moss Point Police Department said in a statement.
"The driver of that vehicle stated she was following her GPS and did not realize she was going into the water," police said.
Corion Evans, 16, said he immediately ran over, took off his shoes and shirt and went into the water when he saw the car sinking and heard the three occupants shouting for help.
"I was just like, 'I can't let none of these folks die. They need to get out the water,'" Evans, a Pascagoula High School student, told Biloxi, Mississippi, ABC affiliate WLOX. "So, I just started getting them. I wasn't even thinking about nothing else."
but, yesterday, yahoo tells us:
https://news.yahoo.com/swimming-wasnt-us-190735036.html
YEADON, Pa. — On a hot summer afternoon in 1959, hundreds of Black families in this little town just outside Philadelphia gathered on Union Avenue to cool off and make some history.
Only two years had passed since three of the families had been refused membership by the whites-only swim club in town, a rejection that set off a bustle of kitchen table meetings and door-to-door fundraising. Now on this mid-July afternoon, the Nile Swim Club was celebrating its grand opening: the first Black-owned private swim club in the country.
After the speeches, the board members waded into the new pool, and after what Bill Mellix, who was 13 at the time, remembers as an interminable few minutes of waiting, the children were invited to join them. They laughed, splashed and reveled in their achievement. But there was one thing that most of them did not do.
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“None us knew how to swim,” Mellix said.
The mere existence of the Nile Swim Club was a strike against the bigoted history of recreational swimming in the United States. But there are legacies of that history that run deeper than racist membership policies — legacies that the Nile is now trying to remedy one swimmer at a time.
To this day, Black children are far more likely than white children to report low or no swimming ability, a disparity that underlies other, grimmer statistics. Black people drown at a rate 50% higher than that of white people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In swimming pools in particular, the drowning rate for Black children ages 10-14 is nearly eight times that of white children of the same age. The disparities are only reinforced by their tragic consequences.