Wayne M. Collins

Wayne Mortimer Collins (November 23, 1899 – July 16, 1974) was a civil rights attorney who worked on cases related to the Japanese American evacuation and internment.

As a result, Collins spent much of his youth in an institutional home affiliated with the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco's Potrero Hill area.

[7][1] Collins' first major case for the branch was on behalf of a nine-year old Jehovah's Witness who had been suspended from school for refusing to cite the Pledge of Allegiance based on religious grounds.

[11] In the spring of 1944, Ernest Besig became aware of a hastily constructed stockade at California's Tule Lake Segregation Center, in which Japanese American internees were routinely being brutalized and held for months without due process.

[14] Adopting Collins' arguments, Federal Judge Louis E. Goodman found the mass renunciations unconstitutional, stating: "It is shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined without authority and while so under duress and restraint for this government to accept from him a surrender of his constitutional heritage.

"[15] "Not even the hysterics and exigencies of war", Goodman had warned in his opinion, "excused the government for the egregious constitutional wrongs it had committed by imprisoning citizens not charged with a crime".

[12] This included the filing of a presidential pardon petition for Iva Toguri D'Aquino, which President Gerald R. Ford granted during his final days in office.

[24] Although largely unknown to the general public, Collins' relentless efforts on behalf of the Japanese Americans have been recognized in various posthumous honors and dedications.

[26] In the dedication for her influential book Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps, former internee Michi Nishiura Weglyn wrote that Collins "... did more to correct a democracy's mistake than any other one person".