Ben Wakaye

Ben Wakaye, a steering-committee member of the Fair Play Committee, was one of the seven leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, the organized draft-resistance movement among Japanese Americans imprisoned at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming during World War II. The Committee held that it was unconstitutional to draft incarcerated Nisei — U.S. citizens stripped of their rights and held behind barbed wire with their families — unless those citizenship rights were first restored. In October 1944 the leaders were tried in federal court in Cheyenne for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion; the jury convicted all seven. Wakaye received two years for conspiracy, concurrent with his separate three-year draft-resistance sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned the conspiracy convictions in 1945.