*Derrick Lewis, an African American MMA fighter from Houston, is among the many citizens who have waded through waist-deep flood waters to help save folks who are stranded.
Among those the athlete has rescued, he says, was a family who had among their belongings a Confederate flag.
Lewis, known to UFC fans as “The Black Beast,” has been helping families since Sunday by responding to messages on Facebook and using his Chevy pickup truck to move residents to safer spaces, according to The Huffington Post.
“I picked up one guy and his family, his wife ― he just kept apologizing to me, because all he really had was his clothes, and he wanted to take his Confederate flag,” Lewis told MMAJunkie on Monday. “He wanted to take that with him, and he just apologized and said, ‘Man, I’ll sit in the back of your truck, man. I don’t want to have my flag inside of your truck like this.’ I said, ‘Man, I’m not worried about that.‘’’
“His wife kept hitting him and saying, ‘You should have just left it,’” he added.
Lewis said he wasn’t concerned with the flag, which represented the Confederacy during the civil war and its fight to preserve slavery.
“I don’t care about that,” Lewis told MMAjunkie. “I live in Texas. It ain’t nothing new. I’ve been living in the South all my life, and it ain’t nothing I hadn’t seen before or discussed about. I don’t care about that type of stuff. I just wanted to help him.”
Lewis posted videos and images to Twitter this week showing how terrible conditions were in Houston and how he worked alongside others to help get residents to dry ground.
It feels good to help people pic.twitter.com/RtyYIkdGor
— Derrick Lewis (@Thebeast_ufc) August 28, 2017
The kids are good ?? pic.twitter.com/SNXENDo4z3
— Derrick Lewis (@Thebeast_ufc) August 28, 2017
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