Word: draft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WITHOUT knowing about the background of Collins and the nature of his draft board, one could excuse this case as an error of justice. While it was certainly that, there is strong reason to suspect that various government agencies wanted Collins put away for a while...
Collins's all-white draft board cannot be cited as a mode of community representation even though in May of 1967 a "token Negro" was subsequently appointed to the six man board, the area served by this board is two-thirds black...
COLLINS'S POLITICAL ACTIVITY strongly indicates why his draft board wanted to put his away. In addition to his graduate work, Collins continued in the fight for social justice. At the time of his induction proceedings he was a staff member of SCEF, helping to form a black-white alliance of workers in the Masonite Corporation in Laurel, Miss. According to Braden, Collins's work paid off last fall in the successful woodcutters strike. Braden claims. "The black white unity of the recent strike was, in a large part, due to the work of Walter Collins...
Collins was also the regional director of the National Association of Black Students (NABS) and a founder of the National Black Draft Counsellors. Through his own experience, Collins had found that it is blacks who consistently are misinformed about their rights. He felt that they need a unified information agency with an expanded network of weeks before he was to open the first convention of his new organization in Chicago, he was arrested, even though al appeals channels had not (and have not yet) been exhausted...
...AMERICAN judicial system has shown as much disregard as the draft board for Collins's rights. the trial and subsequent appeals have hardly been a model of jurisprudence. The selection of the jury gave the prosecution a stacked deck. Before the foreman of the jury was accepted, he asked, "I'm a spy, a secret agent for the Army. Would that prejudice the case?" In addition, several women on the jury were wives and mothers of policemen...