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A Hero For Justice
Monday, August 10, 2009
Ivy Black History Feature: "A Hero For Justice" [by: Brett Hoover]
By: Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
It was nearly 50 years ago that a small-town lawyer from Wisconsin found himself
at the violent epicenter of a social revolution in a strange and distant land.
The lawyer was John Doar.
The revolution was the civil rights movement.
The land was the American South.
"The story of John Doar needs to be told," says John Lewis, the Georgia
congressman and battered hero of that era. "As a nation and as a people,
we wouldn't be where we are today without John Doar."
John Doar is now 88, in good health and all but retired from the New York City
law firm he founded. He is not what you would call famous, inside or outside
Wisconsin.
But he is legendary, a distinctive historical character, tall and tough and
taciturn, abruptly thrust into two postwar political earthquakes: the overthrow
of Jim Crow, when Doar worked the Southern states for the Justice Department
and was a central figure in many of the iconic events of the age; and the fall
of Richard Nixon, when Doar served as the top attorney for the House committee
investigating Watergate.
"Nobody could be luckier," Doar says of his legal career.
It's fair to say Doar is better known to some Americans for his cameo in Watergate
than for his long slog as a civil rights official in the 1960s.
But it's his civil rights work that is arguably Doar's real legacy and the source
of his mystique as a public servant of understated grit. To his discomfort,
comparisons to Gary Cooper and Marshal Matt Dillon have been a staple of Doar
coverage over the years.
"My hero," says 87-year-old newspaperman Bill Minor, who in 1963 watched
Doar defuse a potential riot in Jackson, Miss. after the assassination and funeral
of the NAACP's Medgar Evers.
Minor wrote an account of the incident under the title, "The Day John Doar
Saved Mississippi." Tie knotted, shirt sleeves rolled up, Doar stepped
between a cordon of itchy-fingered lawmen and angry black protesters, announced
himself as a federal official and talked the demonstrators into dispersing.
It was 103 degrees. Reporters were certain troopers and deputies were going
to open fire at any moment, sparking a massacre.
"It wasn't all that much," Doar says during a long interview in his
law office.
"Kids started to throw rocks. That's when I thought it could get bad if
it didn't stop. I told them my name and (said) 'Everybody knew I stood for what
was right.' It was corny," says Doar with a sheepish grin.
"They should have built a monument to him" in Mississippi, says Minor,
who covered the state for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
To read the rest of this story in its entirety, as found in the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, please click here.
