Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese American Rights by Charles Wollenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese-American Rights, Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, sounds unnerving alarms recurring in the present as well. Wollenberg states that his “argument is that the United States Constitution is not self-starting; it needs human intervention to transform its noble words and principles into concrete reality.”

A researcher and writer of Berkeley: A City in History in 2008, Wollenberg scrupulously followed attorney Wayne Collins’ defenses of “the rights and liberties of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese American population,” and drew a good-sized crowd to the eclectic and elegant temple of creativity that is the ACCI Gallery (Arts & Crafts Cooperative Inc.), 1652 Shattuck Ave. Our curiosity was not disappointed.

Mr. Wollenberg explained that Fred Korematsu was one of the irascible but deeply persistent and committed Collins’ defendants, as was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a U.S. citizen unwillingly captured in Japan and forced to read radio scripts as one of several “Tokyo Rose” voices, with whom he pursued citizenship reinstatement and pardon for over 20 years. Collins was connected to the defense, release and eventual recompense for thousands of detainees at Tule Lake detention camp and elsewhere on the West Coast.

They survived years of discrimination encumbered, interned, threatened with deportation and/or disenfranchised by public fear and Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, echoing racialized past U.S. domestic legal wrongs through post- 9/11 anti-Muslim attacks and our present Southern border panic and inhumanity.
Irish-American Wayne Mortimer Collins mobilized not only his defendants, but whole communities of volunteers to work for their rights and personal dignity, inspiring civil rights lawyers and social justice advocates well into the 21st Century.

Waiting for Registration 1942

Collins died in 1974, but by that time Dorothea Lange’s exhibit of photos of the 1942 initial removal and incarceration had been presented by the California Historical Society and toured the country, significantly moving public and government opinion.
In 1983 a U.S. Commission “unanimously concluded that the policy of removal and incarceration was unnecessary, unconstitutional, and motivated by racism and political expediency.”
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!


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