Princeton University Athletics
John Doar '44 Wins NCAA Inspiration Award
December 13, 2005 | General
Dec. 13, 2005
John Doar, who was born to the Northern winter of 1921 and then made his greatest impact literally in the Southern heat, has been named one of three winners of the 2006 NCAA Inspiration Award.
The Inspiration Award, which is not automatically awarded annually, recognizes a current or former coach, administrator or varsity letter-winner at an NCAA institution who when confronted with a life-altering situation used perseverance, dedication and determination to overcome the event and now serves as a role model for others.
Doar, a 1944 Princeton graduate who lettered in basketball, is being honored for a career that saw him become one of the most important figures in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Doar will share the award with Amherst lacrosse goalie Raul Altreche, who went from being orphaned and abandoned in New York City at an early age to become a high school honor student and college student-athlete, and Lois Taurman, who lettered in three sports at Bellarmine and then continued her nursing education and athletic career despite an accident that left her a quadriplegic. The three will be honored at the NCAA convention Jan. 7, 2006, in Indianapolis.
"We are greatly appreciative that the NCAA chose to honor one of Princeton's finest," said Director of Athletics Gary Walters. "John Doar a towering figure in the history of the American Civil Rights movement who at the same time is a man of great humility and modesty. He represents the very best of the student-athlete-citizen ideal."
Doar was born in Minnesota and grew up in northern Wisconsin as the son of a country lawyer. He majored in history at Princeton and averaged seven points per game as a junior on a basketball team that included Bud Palmer and Butch van Breda Kolff. After taking a year off to train as a fighter pilot (the war would end before he could be deployed), Doar returned and averaged eight points per game as a senior before breaking his hand and missing most of his final season.
After graduating from Princeton, he then went to law school at the University of California, after which he returned to his roots and the family practice.
"Then I looked around late in 1959 and became conscious from newspaper articles and magazines that nothing had happened with segregation since I left Princeton," he says. "A friend of mine called me and asked if I'd like to go to work for the Justice Department, in the Civil Rights Division. It didn't take me long to say I'd do it. I moved my family to Washington on July 4, 1960."
At the time the entire staff consisted of four lawyers. The early '60s were a time Doar spent crisscrossing the South, working through the judiciary branch to pass and enforce laws promoting racial equality. The staff of his division quadrupled, and their efforts resulted in some of the greatest social gains in the history of the country.
Along the way Doar was the point man on several epic projects. In 1963 he successfully prosecuted seven men accused of murdering three civil rights workers in Mississippi. He was at the front of the legendary civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. His work in the first half of the decade led Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated all traditional hindrances to registering black voters. Within one year a quarter of a million new black voters in the South had registered.
Perhaps his most dangerous role in the South came in 1964, when he personally took James Meredith to desegregate the University of Mississippi.
"They had taken Meredith up there once, and they had been turned away," Doar says. "The president and the attorney general were determined he was going to get into that university. I went with him the next time, and we were turned away. On the fourth trip we got in. That night there was a riot. I lived with him for the next few weeks."
After nearly eight years of being on the road more than 200 days a year, Doar left the division to work on a project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
"Robert Kennedy asked me to work there," Doar says. "Three or four months later, he was killed. I felt I owed it to him to stay, he had done so many good things for me. I stayed for six years."
At that point New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino called Doar to become part of another dramatic moment in 20th century history, the investigation into the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal. Doar, a lifelong Republican, became chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.
Once his impeachment became an inevitability, Nixon resigned in August of 1974. Doar then returned to private practice, where he still works today.
"My personality is such that I never needed to talk to a newspaperman," he says. "I didn't need to see my picture around. I didn't need to leak anything to anyone. I just was part of a hard-working group of people who had a spirit grounded in hope. It was the kind of spirit where you do things not because of the likelihood of success but rather because they're the right thing to do."