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Omaha • 1967–1968

The greatest wave of riots, lootings, and burnings since the Civil War swept the country during the summer of 1967. Afterward, Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Many more riots of the kind we had last summer and we shall be in danger of a right-wing takeover of the fascist type!”1 Privately angry at the movement’s lack of progress, King still refused to endorse violent resistance; some activists felt that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference should have mounted a much more confrontational response to the ugly force of nightsticks and cross burnings they faced that summer.

Omaha’s nonviolent activists counted the Buffetts—both of whom were now influential in town—among their informal network. Rackie Newman, the wife of Warren’s best friend in Omaha, Nick Newman, was working with Susie to pressure the YMCA and the boards of other organizations to give a fairer share of money to their branches in impoverished areas. Through the United Methodist Community Center, run by an African-American friend, Rodney Wead,2 Susie and Rackie sent black kids to summer camp and set up an interracial dialogue group for local high school students.3 Wead had become a frequent presence in the Buffett house. John Harding, who ran Buffett’s back office, collected thousands of signatures for an open-housing petition. Nick Newman helped bring Warren directly into the struggle by sponsoring his participation in various local civil-rights groups. Warren’s role was not to labor, but to speak. He, Newman, and Harding testified before the legislature in Lincoln on open housing. For her part, Susie went out and at least a few times actually bought houses, fronting for blacks who wanted to move into white neighborhoods.4

Recently, Warren had been introduced to Joe Rosenfield, who ran the Younkers chain of department stores based in nearby Des Moines.5 Rosenfield was well connected in both local and national politics and shared the Buffetts’ political views. He was also a trustee of Grinnell College, which sat like a tiny radical island in the middle of the farming hamlet of Grinnell, Iowa.6 Its liberal-minded students tended to go into social services after graduation, and the school was focusing its funding on increasing its African-American enrollment.

Eighty-some years after its founding in 1846, Grinnell had nearly gone broke, but in the quarter century since Rosenfield had taken over the endowment, he had built it to nearly $10 million.7 He had a keen wit, as well as an edge of sadness about him, having lost his only son in a tragic accident; Susie Buffett quickly developed a special relationship with him. Given all their shared interests, Rosenfield naturally wanted to involve the Buffetts with Grinnell, his most important cause.

In October 1967, the college was presenting a three-day fund-raising convocation on “the liberal arts college in a world of change” and had assembled a brilliant panoply of 1960s culture in its speakers’ roster—including author Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man had won a National Book Award; social biologist Ashley Montagu, who had questioned the validity of race as a biological concept; communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, who had popularized the idea of a media-driven “global village” contemporary artist Robert Rauschenberg; and Fred Friendly, the retired former president of CBS News. But the speaker they were all waiting for was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.8 Nobel Peace Prize winners were not everyday visitors to Iowa. Rosenfield had invited the Buffetts to the convocation; they were among the five thousand people who packed themselves into Darby Gymnasium for that Sunday morning’s program.

King flew in with the president of Morehouse College, who was going to introduce him. They were hours late; state troopers, deputies, police, and private security guards had been standing on alert since before ten a.m., ready for trouble. As they waited, the audience grew hungry and restless.

Finally King strode