John Doar
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John Michael Doar (born December 3, 1921 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American lawyer and currently senior counsel with the law firm Doar Rieck & Mack in New York.
Six months before John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, Doar joined the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice. He was involved in several events which constituted the American civil rights movement. In 1962, Doar confronted Ross Barnett over Barnett's attempts to prevent James Meredith from entering the then-segregated University of Mississippi. He also prosecuted and convicted Collie Leroy Wilkins for federal civil rights violations in the murder of Viola Liuzzo, before an all-white jury in Alabama. As a federal prosecutor Doar could not prosecute someone for murder, which was a state offense. In 1963, Doar confronted and calmed an angry mob after the murder of Medgar Evers.
He prosecuted the federal case for civil rights violations against the people who were accused of lynching Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, in events which were later depicted in the movie Mississippi Burning. Doar later contributed to drafting the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which Lyndon Johnson signed in an attempt to solve some of the problems that he had observed in the deep south.
He left the government in the later part of the Johnson administration, returning only in 1974 as counsel for the judiciary committee of the United States House of Representatives, which was then investigating the Watergate scandal.
