A Jewish lawyer from Russia fought for the civil rights of Japanese Americans. His name was Abraham Lincoln.
April 11, 1900: A. L. Wirin, the ACLU lawyer who defended Japanese Americans in some of the most important civil rights cases of the 20th century, was born in Russia.
When Japanese Americans were being stripped of their rights during World War II, one of their fiercest defenders was a Jewish immigrant from Russia named Abraham Lincoln Wirin.
He hated the name and preferred A. L. Wirin, but he spent much of his life living up to it.
As the first staff attorney for the Southern California ACLU, Wirin became one of the most important legal allies in the fight against anti-Japanese laws and wartime incarceration. He worked on landmark cases tied to Minoru Yasui, Fred Korematsu, Kajiro Ōyama, and Torao Takahashi, helping challenge curfews, exclusion, alien land laws, and discriminatory fishing restrictions.
Courtesy of Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
Abraham Lincoln Wirin became a leading civil rights attorney as director of the ACLU of Southern California. He preferred going by A. L. Wirin instead of his given names.
Courtesy of the Yasui family
Minoru Yasui spent decades fighting for Japanese Americans’ constitutional rights.
Fred Korematsu refused to be silenced. When the government tried to incarcerate him during WWII, he said no — and took his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Courtesy of Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
A.L. Wirin, Dr. George Ochikubo, and Saburo Kido representing JACL in Korematsu case, 1944, Los Angeles.
From Antisemitism to Civil Rights
Born to a Jewish family in Russia, Wirin immigrated to the United States around 1908, part of a generation fleeing instability and antisemitism.
He studied at Harvard before transferring to Boston University, eventually building both a private legal practice and a lifelong civil-rights career.
After joining the ACLU, he settled in Los Angeles, where his legal work would become deeply intertwined with some of the most important Japanese American civil-rights battles in the country.
Among the many cases Wirin touched, two became especially important to Japanese American civil rights.
Oyama v. California
In 1945, Wirin helped take on the California Alien Land Act, one of the most discriminatory legal tools used against Japanese immigrants and their families.
The case centered on Kajiro Oyama, whose family had used their American-born son’s name to hold land the state argued they were not entitled to own.
The Supreme Court’s ruling helped accelerate the eventual collapse of California’s alien land laws.
The Ōyama family outside their home on their Chula Vista farm, later seized by the state of California under the Alien Land Laws.
San Diego Journal, August 23, 1945
Kajirō Ōyama (right) with attorney Abraham Lincoln Wirin following a 1945 court ruling ordering land he operated for his son to revert to the state of California.
Courtesy of Lilian Hoffecker
Taro Takahashi and family. Takahashi v. Fish and Game Commission (1948), one of the civil rights cases A. L. Wirin later called among the most important he ever handled.
Takahashi v. California Fish and Game Commission
In 1948, Wirin helped challenge another discriminatory California law, this time involving fishing licenses denied to “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”
The case of Torao Takahashi struck directly at one of the ways California tried to economically exclude Japanese immigrants after the war.
The Supreme Court ruled in Takahashi’s favor, helping dismantle another pillar of anti-Japanese discrimination.
A Lawyer Who Changed More Than the Law
A. L. Wirin did far more than argue cases.
He helped expose how race-based laws in California had been built into housing, work, movement, and citizenship itself.
For Japanese Americans, his legal work became part of the long path from exclusion to civil rights.
During World War II, Wirin received death threats for his work in defending the citizenship rights of Japanese Americans, driven by anti-Japanese sentiment and anti-Semitism.
Yet, he didn’t quit. We thank him for that.
Courtesy of Densho / The Frank Abe Collection
A. L. Wirin celebrating a legal victory, April 1946. Wirin brought a series of courtroom victories that helped restore rights to Japanese Americans.