Later in his second term, Collins made an unsuccessful run in the Democratic primary of the 1966 United States Senate election in Massachusetts.

[3][5] Collins spent two terms as senator and then ran unsuccessfully for state attorney general in 1954, losing to George Fingold.

[11][14][15] When Collins lost his campaign for Massachusetts Attorney General in 1954, only one new private office building had appeared on the city skyline since 1929.

[13] In the same year, Collins and Edward Logue organized a consortium of savings banks, cooperatives, and federal and state savings and loan associations in the city called the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B-BURG) that would provide $2.5 million in Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured rehabilitation and home-ownership loans at less than 5.25% interest in Washington Park around Dudley Square in Roxbury.

[22] In the mid-1960s, Carl Ericson, Vice President of the Suffolk Franklin Savings Bank (a B-BURG member institution), began making loans to white professionals in the South End, causing displacement of the decades-old local black population into North Dorchester.

[27] On March 20, 1968, a $996,000 FHA commitment was made through the Boston Rehabilitation Program (BURP) to the Sanders Associates (a housing development group created by Boston Celtics forward Tom Sanders in response to a search led by local energy business executive Eli Goldston) for the rehabilitation of 83 units in Roxbury after local community activists (including Mel King) criticized BURP for a lack of sufficient community control and racial equity.

[28] In May 1962, Boston NAACP President Melnea Cass filed a formal complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination alleging a pattern of discrimination in public housing in the city, citing that the Mission Hill Extension project went from 314 nonwhite families in 1957 to 492 nonwhite families of 572 units in 1961 while the Mission Hill project remained all-white.

[29] In the same year, upon receipt of a lawsuit filed by a civil rights group, the West Broadway Housing Development was desegregated after having been designated by the city for white-only occupancy since 1941.

[48] On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968 including Titles VIII and IX introduced by Massachusetts U.S.

[51] In August 1965, Collins publicly requested that UMass Boston Chancellor John W. Ryan not consider a permanent campus at its current site in Park Square or elsewhere in Downtown Boston (as a disproportionate amount of the real estate there was already owned by many colleges and other non-profit institutions exempt from the city government's property taxes), and to move to a suburban campus or one located in an underdeveloped section of Roxbury instead, while University of Massachusetts President John W. Lederle insisted on a campus inside the city limits.

[52] In May 1966, following organized opposition from residents, Collins spoke with Chancellor Ryan and a proposal to locate the UMass Boston campus near Highland Park was cancelled.

[53] In 1967, the Boston Redevelopment Authority proposed locating the campus permanently at a former landfill on the Columbia Point peninsula closed in 1963.

[54][55][56] In response, in November 1967, 1,500 faculty and students organized a rally on Boston Common demanding a location in Copley Square.

[57] Over multiple counterproposals from Chancellors Ryan and Francis L. Broderick and at the public urging of Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Robert H. Quinn, Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Kevin B. Harrington, and State Senator George V. Kenneally Jr.,[58] the UMass Board of Trustees voted 12 to 4 to accept the Columbia Point campus proposal from the BRA in December 1968 and the university would move to the campus in January 1974.

[59][60] On April 1, 1965, a special committee appointed by Massachusetts Education Commissioner Owen Kiernan released its final report finding that more than half of black students enrolled in Boston Public Schools (BPS) attended institutions with enrollments that were at least 80 percent black and that housing segregation in the city had caused the racial imbalance.

[70] In April 1962, Collins's administrative staff described protests in Columbia Point following a six-year-old girl being run over and killed by a dump truck operated by a negligent city government employee as "interracial riots.

"[71] In response to the Boston NAACP complaint in May 1962 to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the Boston Housing Authority rented a single apartment to an elderly black woman in the Mission Hill development which was stoned over two consecutive nights,[29] and Collins aides scuttled a formal probe of the incident by the Massachusetts Attorney General's office.

Virgil Wood (the regional representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and former pastor at the Diamond Hill Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia).

On Friday, June 2, during a summer when 159 race riots occurred across the United States, 25 white and black MAW members and a contingent of college students arrived at the Grove Hall welfare office at 4:20 PM, presented a list of 10 demands, and chained the doors from the inside, preventing 58 office employees from leaving.

[89] The following morning, Saturday, June 3, MAW stated that a deputy superintendent said, "get them, beat them, use clubs if you have to, but get them out of here," with one mother described being "beaten, kicked, dragged, abused, insulted and brutalized" by police who used "vulgar language" and repeated the word "nigger," while Deputy Superintendent William A. Bradley stated, "The demonstrators refused to move.

"[86] Collins ordered the Boston Police Department to close all bars and liquor stores on Blue Hill Avenue, but by 10:30 PM, fire alarms were being falsely set off, and unplanned spontaneous outbursts of violence occurred among roving gangs in Roxbury through the night.

[89] On the evening of Sunday, June 4, 1,900 police were called in to quell further rioting and looting in the Grove Hall area, making 11 arrests, and with 11 more being injured.

Collins and the Boston Police Department attributed the violence to a criminal element among the rioters rather than race relations in the city.

Weakened politically, Collins declined to seek reelection in 1967 and was succeeded by Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth Kevin White.

[92] The Associated Press obituary noted that the urban renewal policies Collins implemented in Boston were emulated across the United States.