San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The fighter
Charles Wollenberg’s compact study of the San Francisco lawyer Wayne Collins (18991974), packs a wallop, though it’s not a comprehensive biography. By focusing on Collins’ defense of Japanese Americans in the 1940s — including the notorious woman known as “Tokyo Rose” — Wollenberg pays homage to a little-known crusader for civil rights and civil liberties. At the same time, he opens a window into the turbulent lives of the men, women and children who were the target of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued on Feb. 19, 1942, 10 weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and precipitated the entry of the U.S. into World War II.
A professor of history at Berkeley City College, and the author most recently of “Berkeley: A City in History,” Wollenberg takes his inspiration from novelist William Faulkner, who observed, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” In “Rebel Lawyer,” Wollenberg looks at the past through the lens of the present, and the present through the lens of the past. His book is for lawyers, law students, judges and prosecutors who want to understand the workings of the American judicial system during a time of national crisis. It’s also for activists enraged by the Trump administration’s campaign to ban some Muslims from entering the U.S.
“Rebel Lawyer” fuels indignation at both Roosevelt and Trump. It also invites liberals to rethink the role that the American Civil Liberties Union played in the wake of Executive Order 9066. Rather than rush to the defense of Japanese Americans who were rounded up and placed in “detention centers,” the national office aligned itself with the White House. Wayne Collins defied both the president and the ACLU leadership and carved out a role for himself as a San Francisco rebel lawyer in the mold of Vincent Hallinan and Melvin Belli.
Jonah Raskin is the author of “Natives, Newcomers, Exiles, Fugitives: Northern California Writers and their Work.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com