THE CASE OF WALTER COLLINS, a black activist thrown in jail for resisting the draft, has not received the same attention in the North as the cases of Angela Davis or the Berrigan brothers.

Last Monday, March 20, Carl Braden, information director of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) spoke at Boston State College to bring the issue to the attention of the Boston area.

Speaking to small gatherings of students throughout the day, Braden emphasized how "the war and the draft are used as a means of repression--especially in the black community. "He pointed out that the case of Walter Collins is ' typically horrible example of racism and political repression." Braden called for an unconditional total amnesty for all those who have opposed the war.

The Collins case deserves national attention because his persecution by the authorities is one of those classic illustrations of how "coincidences" or "mistakes" pile up, pointing to a conspiracy of government to remove a political activist from his work.

COLLINS HAS SPENT the last sixteen months in the federal penitentiary in Texarkana, Texas. Convicted of five concurrent maximum sentences of five years and a $2,000 fine on November 27, 1970.

Perhaps Walter Collins was destined to wind up on the wrong side of the law. His mother, Virginia Collins, has been a long time civil rights activist and is now a vice-president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), a national board member of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and a member of he executive board of the National Committee for Amnesty Now. Her father was a follower of Marcus Garvey and a leader of the early voter registration programs. The junior Collins, raised in the black section of New Orleans called Carrolton, is one of ten children--all of whom have been arrested in some connection with civil rights activities.

COLLINS, who is now 27 years old, entered the civil rights movement from the ground floor. In 1963, he participated in the early sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters and theaters in New Orleans. Soon after, he joined SNCC to help register voters in Louisiana and Mississippi and with the '64 Mississippi Summer Project.

Collins graduated from LSU and went on to receive a Master's degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In late 1966 he was working as a fulltime graduate student on a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of mathematics as related to social change when his draft board cancelled his 25 deferment and classified him IA. At the time, graduate student were still legally entitled o student deferments. Within two weeks of his reclassification, his draft board ordered his induction.

COLLINS WENT TO New Orleans to plead his case personally before his draft board and request a conscientious objector application. He was told that since he was a full-time student, he would be reclassified 25. Collins was satisfied and returned to Michigan, dropping the CO matter. Upon arrival, he was greeted by an induction order dated before his trip. Since the date of induction had already passed, he returned immediately to New Orleans to clear himself and seek a CO form. The clerk instructed Collins that it was too late to apply for CO status because he had already been ordered to induction. (Courts have since ruled that a registrant may apply for CO at any time.)

This evidence was uncontested by the government in Collin's subsequent trial after an indictment of six counts of refusal of induction (count each "refusal"-all six of them).

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.

Basing their argument on the precedent set by Whitus V. Georgia, Collins's attorneys argued in their brief filed before the Supreme Court that "Negroes have been systematically excluded from membership on the board where, in view of the racial composition of the area served by the board, it would be expected that in the absence of systematic exclusion, Negroes would have been appointed."

The Selective Service Act stipulates that board members mist live in the country that the aboard serves and the internal regulations state that they must live within the area. (This requirement was abolished by executive order on September 2, 1970.) Yet only one member of Collin's Board lived in his area, and the chairman lived in another county. The Sixth Circuit Court has found (U.S. v. Cabbage) that these violations of residency requirements were usually racially motivated to preserve segregation.

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."