In the wake of 9/11, Pardeep Singh Kaleka, a young Sikh spent several days at his father's South Milwaukee gas station, afraid of racist attacks on his father. A decade later, his father Satwant Singh Kaleka was shot dead when a white supremacist opened fire at a Sikh temple (gurdwara) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

Wade Michael Page’s shooting rampage at the Gurdwara killed six Sikhs included one woman, Paramjit Kaur (41), and five men, Satwant Singh Kaleka (65), the founder of the gurdwara; Prakash Singh (39), a Granthi, Sita Singh (41), Ranjit Singh (49) and Suveg Singh Khattra (84).

Satwant Singh Kaleka, the president of the gurdwara in Milwaukee suburb, stood up to the rampaging white supremacist with a kirpan, fighting off till the very end, when he was taken down in gunfire.

His son Amardeep Kaleka said he was not surprised his father tried to stop the gunman

"It's an amazing act of heroism, but it's also exactly who he was," Amardeep told CNN Milwaukee affiliate WTMJ. "There was no way in God's green Earth that he would allow somebody to come in and do that without trying his best to stop it."

family photo | CNN

Amardeep Kaleka told CNN that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told him his father attacked the shooter in the lobby. There was a "blood struggle". A kirpan close to the victim's body showed blood on it, he said. "From what we understand, he basically fought to the very end and suffered gunshot wounds while trying to take down the gunman," said Kanwardeep Singh Kaleka, Satwant's nephew.

Today we remember the victims of the attack on the Sikh Gurdwara in WI and the many people affected by this tragedy https://t.co/70MdMiv8yL — Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) August 5, 2016

While 9/11 made conservative America suspicious of Islam, it is both Sikhs and Muslims which have suffered the brunt of this hatred. Pardeep Kaleka, a former police officer and teacher is now a part of a movement which plans educational sessions and rallies, and has successfully pushed the FBI to track hate crimes against Sikhs.

There are more than 500,000 Sikhs in the US

They have reported bullying, persecution and vandalism at both gurudwaras and homes. In December 2015, a California gurdwara was vandalized, along with a truck in the parking lot by someone who misspelled the word "Islam" and made an obscene reference to ISIS.

The same month, Stanford Law School fellow Valerie Kaur revealed that airline Delta had forced her to show that her breast pump wasn’t a weapon – one of the "countless subtle acts of profiling of Muslim Sikh and brown bodies in the last 14 years”, she wrote on Facebook.

President Obama wrote in a post on the official White House site: [A]n attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths. And when any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up. And we have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion. We’ve got to make sure that hate crimes are punished, and that the civil rights of all Americans are upheld. . . . We have to be consistent in condemning hateful rhetoric and violence against everyone.