Johnnie Cochran

He was married to Barbara Berry Cochran from 1960 to 1977 and to Sylvia Dale from 1985 to 2005. He had three children - Tiffany and Melodie from first marriage and Jonathan from his former girlfriend.

He was diagnosed with brain tumour in December 2003 and underwent surgery in April 2004. He however, succumbed to it on March 29, 2005 at his Los Angeles home. His casket was kept at ‘Angelus Funeral Home’ on April 4 and at ‘Second Baptist Church’, in Los Angeles on April 5 for public viewing.

On April 6, 2005, a memorial service was held at Los Angeles’ ‘West Angeles Church of God in Christ’ and then his remains were buried in ‘Inglewood Park Cemetery’ in Inglewood, California.

Johnnie L Cochran, Jr. was born on October 2, 1937, in Shreveport, Louisiana, US in the family of Johnnie L. Cochran Sr. and his wife, Hattie. His father was with ‘Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company’ as an insurance salesman and his mother used to sell products of Avon. His great-grandfather was a slave.

His family like millions of other African-American families shifted to the West Coast at the time of the second phase of the ‘Great Migration’ and in 1949 they settled in Los Angeles.

Coming from a well-off family who accentuated him to be independent, well-educated and unprejudiced, Cochran attended public schools and excelled in his studies.

He remained among around two dozen African-American students at that time who studied at the ‘Los Angeles High School’ and graduated first in his class from the high school in 1955.

In 1959 he completed his graduation from the ‘University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in business economics.

He took to legal practice after getting inspired by Thurgood Marshall and the latter’s historic win in the ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ case. After he passed the bar in 1963, Cochran started to work in Los Angeles as a deputy criminal prosecutor.

His early celebrity cases included that of comedian Lenny Bruce that landed up in 1964 when the latter was incarcerated with obscenity charges. After a couple of years, Cochran started private practice with Gerald Lenoir and eventually launched his own firm in Los Angeles, ‘Cochran, Atkins & Evans’.

He represented the widow of Leonard Deadwyler, an African-American man who was shot to death by the LAPD in May 1966. Although he lost the case where many LAPD officers were sued, it stirred the black community and kindled a flame in him that saw him take up many other police brutality cases.

Eventually he took up several high-profile cases involving police abuse and brutality and by the late 1970s he was already a well-known figure in the black community.

In his pursuit to join the government, he went for a pay cut and became the first black assistant district attorney in the office of County District Attorney in Los Angeles in 1978. Such move helped him create and bolster links with the political community as also strive to alter the system while remaining within it.