As you said, in the case of the 5-on-one, that is a different thing.
I had jumped in without reading the story...I made the mistake of coming directly from another thread about the recent murder.
And as I said, I had the unfortunate experience of being assaulted by a group of people, so I have experience with that dynamic first hand.
I was stationed in Cecil Field back in the Seventies when I was in the service and walking back from the chow hall one night in between the barracks, and I felt a very sharp, hard kick in the ass. I whirled around to see a black guy grinning at me, and when I asked why he had kicked me, he said "I don't like your hat" (referring to my squadron hat for the VA-46 Clansmen)
I said, "That is too damn bad because you and I are going to have at it" and as I removed my glasses, four other black guys stepped around the corner. They encircled me as I stepped backwards, and not knowing what else to do, I assumed a martial arts pose hoping to buy a few seconds of time with their uncertainty. It worked as one of them said "Ah, he knows karate..." but that only lasted a few seconds until one lunged at me, I took a swing and down I went.
They were kicking the crap out of me, so I balled up and protected my face and vitals as best I could. They were trying to kick me in the nuts and the face, but fortunately for me, they smelled like they had been drinking, and landed more kicks on each other's legs and ankles than they did on me.
It seemed like it went on for five minutes, but I suppose it may have been only 15 or 30 seconds, at which point I saw an opening in their circle, bolted up and shot through it in one motion with all five of them running after me. I jumped on the concrete steps into the barracks, but knew if I grabbed the door to open it, they would be on me, so I grabbed a swab that was sitting in a bucket there and began jabbing and swinging it at them. I think I had been screaming "HELP!" over and over again at the top of my lungs throughout the entire time, but I don't really remember doing it.
They finally melted away, and I went across the street to the hangar and found my boss, who was on duty, AD1 Woods. When I told him what happened, he said: "Do you want to get together a bunch of our squadron mates and go find them?" 
That was Woods. A good man. While I searched the face of every black guy I passed on that base for months, I simply could not remember the faces. But that simple willingness of Woods to take my side and stand with me against a bunch of black thugs kept me, I think from developing any long-term hatred of blacks because of it. He'll never know, but I have always held out hope to somehow meet him again and thank him in some way.
An amusing side-note, at least for me, was that for years, I could never understand why someone would take issue with me being in a specific squadron, and attacking me for wearing a squadron hat. That wasn't really a "thing", that kind of rivalry, at least not in that sense of a rivalry. It was only in the last ten years or so that the lightbulb went on in my head-the people who attacked me were too illiterate or stupid to understand "Clansmen" was a Scottish heritage reference, not a post-civil war reconstruction terrorist organization such as the "Klansmen".
Granted, they were probably just malicious and looking for someone to beat up, and I was the polar bear they went hunting for, but it did make me grin to realize all these years that obvious fact had escaped me.