This was a great American: John Doar, Federal Lawyer in Battle Against Segregation, dies at 92
John Doar, who was a leader in the federal government’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation in the South during the most volatile period of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and who returned to government service to lead the team that made the constitutional case for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Robert said.
Mr. Doar prosecuted some of the most notorious cases of murder and violence in the South in the ’60s, and was instrumental in changing the region’s pattern of race-based politics based on voter discrimination. In 1974 Mr. Doar, a Republican, was named chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate scandal.
As the chief lawyer for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, he was heavily involved in the investigation of the murder of three young civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss., in 1964. Seventeen men went on trial in 1967 in federal court in Meridian, Miss., charged under a 19th-century federal law with violating the civil rights of the victims, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/us/john-doar-federal-lawyer-in-battle-against-segregation-dies-at-92.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
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