The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [182]
Then, in March 1968, the most controversial man in America, former Alabama Governor George Wallace, arrived at the Omaha City Auditorium to campaign for President.18
More than five thousand people crammed into a room designed to seat 1,400 to see the man who had run for governor seven years before on the platform “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”19 It took less than eight minutes for his supporters to collect the signatures to place him on the Nebraska ballot. The odor of stink bombs filled the air. When Wallace began to speak, demonstrators pelted the platform with sticks, bits of placards, paper drinking cups, and stones.20 Chairs flew, nightsticks cracked, blood splattered, and the police sprayed the crowd with Mace. As the melee spilled out along 16th Street, rioters pulled drivers out of cars and beat them. People started throwing Molotov cocktails, flames raced through the neighborhood, sidewalks filled with broken glass, and looters pawed through the stores. Hours later the violence passed, and calm finally began to descend. Then an off-duty policeman shot and killed a sixteen-year-old black boy inside a pawnshop, mistaking him for a looter.21
Over the next few days, high school students walked out of class, smashing windows and setting fires.22 A few days later, police and snipers armed with automatic weapons traded shots and arrested several people, including members of the Omaha Black Panthers.23
The racial violence continued all that summer, even as Susie never stopped going to the North Side. She trusted in her excellent relations with the community and discounted the personal danger; Warren was not always aware of the details of what she was doing but did feel that at times she went too far in putting others’ interests before her own. His own horror of violence and fear of mob rule had roots that went back a generation.
Howard Buffett had recounted over and over to his children a scene he had witnessed when he was sixteen years old—a day when thousands of people converged on the Douglas County Courthouse, broke in and attempted to lynch the mayor of Omaha, and beat, castrated, and lynched an elderly black man who had been accused of rape. Afterward they dragged his body through the streets, shot bullets into it, lynched it again, and set it afire. The Courthouse Riot became the most shameful episode in Omaha’s history. Howard missed seeing much of the violence, but witnessed the lynch mob turning a streetlamp into an improvised scaffold, and the mayor of Omaha hanging by a noose around his neck before being rescued in the nick of time.24 The memory haunted him for the rest of his life.25 He had seen with his own eyes the speed with which ordinary people, formed into a mob, could act out the lowest depths of human nature.
King’s warning earlier that year about mass social unrest potentially leading to fascism required no explanation to Warren Buffett. His own commitment to siding with the underdog went beyond instinct and rested partly on this train of logic. Many people thought such a thing was inconceivable in the United States, but the seemingly impossible happened time and again. The law is not to change the heart, King said, but to restrain the heartless. And who are they, the heartless? That he did not say.
A few weeks later, King flew to Memphis to speak at the Masonic temple. He reflected on a woman who had stabbed him in New York City and the persistent rumors that an assassin was waiting for him. “I don’t know what will happen now,” he told the audience. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.” The next day, April 4, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel preparing to lead a march of sanitation workers, he was fatally shot in the neck.26
Grief, rage, and frustration poured