Ex-Justice Department civil rights attorney John Doar dies at 92

WASHINGTON – John Doar, who as a top Justice Department civil rights lawyer in the 1960s fought to protect the rights of black voters and worked against segregation in the South, died Tuesday at age 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure in New York, said his son, Burke Doar.

Doar was a Justice Department civil rights lawyer from 1960 to 1967, serving in the final months of the Eisenhower administration and then staying on during the presidencies of President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He rose to the position of assistant attorney general, or top lawyer, in charge of the department’s Civil Rights Division and challenged discriminatory policies in Southern states that curtailed minority access to the voting booth and state universities.

A self-described “Lincoln Republican” who worked for the federal government at the height of the civil rights movement, he played important roles in some of the pivotal moments of that cause.

In 1962, for instance, Doar escorted James Meredith onto the campus of the University of Mississippi, even as then-Gov. Ross Barnett and angry crowds sought to keep the school segregated.

He later was the lead prosecutor in the federal trial arising from the deaths of three civil rights workers – Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner – who were killed in 1964 while in Mississippi to help blacks register to vote. A federal jury returned guilty verdicts against some defendants, including a deputy county sheriff, but acquitted others. Those killings inspired the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning.”

Later in his career, he served as special counsel to the House of Representatives as it investigated the Watergate scandal, recommending in 1974 the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

In awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, Obama credited Doar with laying the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.