http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/22/politics/donald-trump-black-lives-matter-protester-confrontation/

Donald Trump suggested Sunday the half-dozen white attendees at his campaign rally on Saturday may have reacted appropriately when they shoved, tackled, punched and kicked a black protester who disrupted his speech.

“Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said Sunday morning on Fox News, less than 24 hours after his campaign said it “does not condone” the physical altercation.

Actually, I could only locate one news account of violence at a George Wallace rally. Odd, it’s one of those suspicious things where I remember Wallace rallies as violent, but maybe I’m influenced by the violence at Trump rallies? No YouTube archival footage, either. All I found was this trip into the microfilm archives from October 1968, in Detroit:[NB: It’s an iframe of a picture of a newspaper article and isn’t displaying. Try http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1968/10/30/page/8/article/wallace-clips-detriot-speech-short-as-violence-breaks-out Sounds like a full-on riot, and Trump’s not there, yet.

After a little more searching, and watching videos of Wallace rallies, it looks like his followers in 1968 were actually rather polite for the most part, sitting in their chairs and clapping and hooting almost decorously. Things got a little more violent in 1972, and that’s the campaign in which Wallace was shot. It wasn’t until the 1976 campaign that the crowd surpassed (current) Trumpian levels of hooliganism:

…at a Wallace for president rally in downtown Boston. In 1975, that city was contorted by its own race war over school busing, and the enormous two-tier assembly hall was packed. It was an angry crowd — a black television cameraman was punched as he walked up the aisle. In the middle of Wallace’s remarks, there was a loud explosion, and Wallace, who had been paralyzed by a bullet three years earlier, fell forward from his wheelchair into safety behind the podium.

The noise was caused by a crashing klieg light, knocked over in a fracas as a heckler in the balcony was attacked by the crowd. As Wallace clambered back into his chair, his supporters beat the protester bloody and tried to dump him over the balcony rail.

Source: NY Times, 2008: The George Wallace We Forgot

“…his supporters beat the protester bloody…”, well, so far the security guards at Trump rallies have managed to rescue the protesters before things got that bad, but from watching the 2015 videos, it’s clear that it was only intervention by security that saved those people. I mean, “light him on fire”? Holy crap, that’s a lynching reference.

What can I conclude from all this? Trump hasn’t achieved Wallace levels of violence yet, but the trends all point that way.

The driver told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the shooter asked about his country of origin, his faith and the Islamic State militant group, and advocates began asking that the incident be investigated by local and national law enforcement as an anti-Islamic hate crime. Pittsburgh police have made an arrest; their investigation is ongoing.

The incident has had a chilling effect among the region’s Islamic community, amid a national wave of vandalism, harassment and violence targeting Muslims across America. On Monday, a staff member from a North Philadelphia mosque found a severed pig’s head outside the door. In other incidents since the 13 November Paris attacks, pages of a Qur’an were smeared with excrement. A Muslim woman was spit on. A Mosque was the target of a molotov cocktail.

http://fox17online.com/2015/12/14/bottleneck-ownership-says-weekend-shooting-was-a-hate-crime/

The manager told FOX 17 the gunman called the clerk a terrorist, ISIS, and said things like, “I used to kill people like you in Iraq with no problem.”

As of Monday afternoon, the Grand Rapids Police Department is investigating the armed robbery but Sgt. Terry Dixon said they “are not prepared to call this a hate crime.”

The store manager first shared harrowing surveillance video with FOX 17 on Monday morning showing the incident . It began at 11:57 p.m. Saturday, when the video shows a masked gunman armed with a rifle barging through the back door as Tony made the store’s liquor order.

The manager said Tony immediately put his hands up, then emptied the cash register, and gave the suspect the money.

But then the suspect forced Tony to the backroom, away from surveillance cameras. The manager told FOX 17 the robber put his gun into the clerk’s mouth and forced him onto his knees while saying ethnic slurs and calling Tony a “terrorist.”

Then Tony fought back, moving his head to the side just before the shot fired through his cheek. The manager said Tony remembered falling back, the gunman firing two more shots, and then running out the door.