Civil Rights: Following the Action

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Though he is normally quiet and self-effacing, Civil Rights Crusader John M. Doar likes to be where the action is. During seven years in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the past two of them as its chief, the lanky, intense attorney has had action aplenty. He has faced down mobs of angry, riotous Negroes as calmly as he has forced rough-knuckled Southern sheriffs to obey the nation's laws against discrimination. Almost singlehanded, Doar pried open the South's voting booths for the Negro by personally prosecuting more than 30 voting-rights cases in federal court, since 1960 has participated in every major civil rights case from the admission of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi to the successful prosecution of Mississippi Ku Klux Klansmen who killed three civil rights workers.

When Doar, 46, announced last week that he was leaving the Justice Department, his departure was mourned as "the end of an era" and "a major loss to the civil rights movement." Actually, John Doar is not being lost at all. He is going once again to where the action is, this time into the city ghettos, which have become the new battleground for civil rights. Doar will become president of an ambitious self-help project supported jointly by Government and private funds in Brooklyn's crime-ridden, abjectly poor Bedford-Stuyvesant section. His replacement at the Civil Rights Division will be Stephen J. Pollak, 39, a Dartmouth-and Yale-educated Chicagoan who has served as an assistant to the Solicitor General, legal counsel to the President's task force on the war against poverty and, for two years, as Dear's assistant.