Wayne Mortimer Collins

According to Nisei author and activist Michi Weglyn, Attorney Wayne Mortimer Collins, did more to correct a Democracy's mistake than any other one person. Outraged by the constitutional rights that were being violated by the government, Collins took up the cause of Japanese Americans and Japanese Peruvians during World War ll. As an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in San Francisco, he represented Fred Korematsu in his landmark Supreme Court case that tested the constitutionality of the internment and supported the Yasui, Hirabayashi, Endo and other evacuation test cases. Threatening to expose the extreme physical violations at the infamous Tule Lake stockades, Collins forced the administration to release the prisoners and shutdown the stockades. He represented thousands of renunciants from Tule Lake and fought for the right to have their citizenship restored. Collins continued to work on these cases until the late 1960's. With the support of the ACLU, Collins brought public attention to the "legalized kidnaping" of over 2,000 Japanese Latin Americans, obtained a court order to halt their forced deportation in 1946 and represented them in their fight to remain in the United States. In 1973, Wayne Collins wrote in Years of Infamy, "Given another manufactured hysteria over 'national security',or some such expediency to justify ends, citizens can again be carted off at the point of bayonets. That is America's evacuation legacy."