Dr. Daniel Collins - Civil Rights Pioneer
I knew Dr. Dan Collins during the time he rescued his mentally-challenged child from a horrible care system and placed him with us as a full time resident at Synanon.…
I knew Dr. Dan Collins during the time he rescued his mentally-challenged child from a horrible care system and placed him with us as a full time resident at Synanon. We put together a tag team to look out for Craig. Craig had a wonderful time while living at our Marin location. Once a day Craig acted as our unofficial mayor, greeting visitors when the bus arrived with guests from our city locations.
Although I know that Dan was one of our supporters, I did not know how active Dr. Collins was in the San Francisco Bay Area Civil Rights Movement.
To learn more, please visit: The History Makers: Daniel A. Collins
The following is an obituary that chronicles his work:
By RICHARD HALSTEAD | rhalstead@marinij.com | Marin Independent Journal
PUBLISHED: September 26, 2007 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: July 19, 2018 at 8:42 a.m.
When Dr. Daniel Collins first tried to buy his house at 700 Summit Ave. in Mill Valley during the early 1950s, the owner of the home told him a deed restriction prevented him from selling to a black man.
Dr. Collins, who died Sept. 13 at age 91 at The Redwoods retirement community in Mill Valley, eventually convinced the owner to sell the house to him. But that didn’t end the matter.
As Dr. Collins recalled during an interview with the Marin Independent Journal in 1995, real estate agents then offered to buy the house before he and his family could move in.
“That’s the thing about being black in this country,” Dr. Collins told the reporter. “You don’t know how the hell a white person is going to treat you.”
Being one of the first black men to buy a home in Mill Valley was nothing special for Dr. Collins.
He was also the first black professor at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Dentistry and one of the first black men in the country to serve on corporate boards. He founded the Bay Area Urban League and the first black-owned savings and loan in San Francisco.
And Dr. Collins helped to create the Sun-Reporter newspaper in San Francisco; the Church for the Fellowship of All People, one of the first nondenominational, interracial churches in the country; and what today is known as Lifehouse, a residential and counseling center for people with developmental disabilities located in San Rafael.
“The man was a pioneer in so many different ways,” said Noah Griffin of Tiburon, a lawyer and former aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and former San Francisco mayor Frank Jordan.
Dr. Collins was born in 1916 in Darlington, S.C. and grew up in the segregated South. His father operated a heavy-equipment company in Darlington – using mule teams to haul tobacco, cotton and coal in the early days. His mother was a school principal and an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Dr. Collins learned the value of hard work young, laboring as a gardener, selling newspapers and cleaning and selling fish.
Dr. Collins’ parents borrowed $200 on a $1,000 life insurance policy to get the money to send him to Paine College in Augusta, Ga., where he graduated in 1936. Five years later, he had earned his D.D.S. from Meharry Medical College in Nashville and was married. His wife, DeReath, was a dental hygiene student at Meharry.
In 1942, Dr. Collins and DeReath moved to the Bay Area. He recalled the experience in an interview broadcast on KQED-TV in 1999.
“I came to California on the same train that brought the war workers,” Dr. Collins said. “The train was loaded with people with paper bags and cardboard boxes and gunny sacks.”
In 1944, Dr. Collins received his master’s degree at the UCSF School of Dentistry and opened a private practice. He served as an instructor at the dental school from 1942 to 1960. Collins founded the San Francisco chapter of the Urban League, which would become the Bay Area Urban League, in 1946.
Former Gov. Pat Brown appointed Dr. Collins to the state Board of Education in 1960. Dr. Collins was a member of the board in 1966 when it approved a new history textbook for the eighth grade. The book, “The Land of Free,” co-written by famed black historian John Hope Franklin, was one of the first to credit the contribution of minorities and women. It caused an uproar. Clubs organized all over the state with the aim of keeping it out of classrooms. The protesters eventually got their way.
But civil rights wasn’t Dr. Collins’ only concern. After the youngest of his four sons, Craig, was born with developmental disabilities, he helped form Marin Aid to Retarded Children, or MARC, which is now called Lifehouse.
“When my parents addressed the issue of civil rights, it was not just in terms of color or religion,” said his son, Charles Collins.
The elder Collins’ efforts helped pave the way for passage of the Lanterman Act in 1969, a California law that established an entitlement to services and support for people with developmental disabilities.
In addition to Dr. Collins’ many projects he served as a mentor for countless young, black men.
“The thing I will always remember Dan for is the support he gave me when I was at Washington High School,” Griffin said. When Griffin was denied the chance to play Huck Finn in a musical production because he was black, Dr. Collins took the case up with the NAACP.
He remained active even after moving to The Redwoods in 2004. In February, Dr. Collins received an award for his mentoring from the Bay Area Community Development Corp. in San Francisco.
Despite Dr. Collins’ many accomplishments – he also served as a trustee for four universities – “he was the most modest man I’ve ever met,” said Joe Spinelli, of Fairfax.
To illustrate the point, Spinelli, who worked for years as a veterinarian at UCSF, recalled how Dr. Collins’ wife was once surprised by a call from a president at one of those universities. The university president wanted to know if Dr. Collins planned on attending the ceremony at which they were about to dedicate a new library in his name.
“He had never mentioned it,” Spinelli said.
Dr. Collins is survived by sons Daniel, of Winters, Edward and Charles of San Francisco and Craig of San Rafael. A memorial service is planned for 10 a.m. Oct. 13 at the Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley.
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