We also paid tribute to other friends and Allies: Wayne Collins, one of the lawyers who represented Fred Korematsu as well as Japanese and Japanese American renunciants who had given up their American citizenship under duress while imprisoned in Tule Lake. Through a 23-year legal fight, he was able to recover citizenship for over 5,000 individuals.
This story is told in the documentary written and directed by Sharon Yamato, co-directed and edited by Evan Kodani, and narrated by George Takei, “Wayne Collins: One Fighting Irishman.”
Originally from South Carolina, Hugh MacBeth earned a law degree at Harvard University and founded the Baltimore Times before opening a legal practice in Los Angeles. His son had many Nisei friends and attended Japanese language school with them.
MacBeth became an advocate for Japanese Americans after the attack on Pear Harbor. He tirelessly lobbied President Roosevelt and General DeWitt, speaking out publicly against the mass incarceration of the Japanese American community. He worked with ACLU lawyers to represent the Wakayama family in Manzanar, arguing that “race-based confinement constituted unconstitutional discrimination.” After the war both he and his son, Hugh MacBeth, Jr., were actively involved in the fight to end the Alien Land Law–which was finally invalidated in 1948.
Source: Hugh MacBeth, Sr. (1884-1956)