Geronimo Pratt Remembers Johnnie Cochran

Johnnie and I connected long before he began defending members of the Black Panther Party against police repression in Los Angeles. We both came out of the Mississippi Delta and the great tradition of struggle by Africans in the south to liberate ourselves from oppression. We were born into this glorious history of resistance to the slavocracy, from the Bras Coupee Uprising and many other insurrections, to the Afrikan Blood Brotherhood and the Garvey Legionnaires in the 1920s to the Deacons for Defense during the civil rights movement.

Johnnie and I were comrades in struggle, sometimes employing different methods but fighting for similar goals, the freedom and self-determination of Afrikan people in particular and all oppressed people in general. The tradition of struggle continued in Los Angeles where Johnnie “Chief” Cochran Sr. was one of the first men in Los Angeles to support the Free Breakfast for Children’s program of the Black Panther Party at the Second Baptist Church with Rev. Kilgore.

Soon after, his son, Johnnie Cochran Jr. began defending the members of the Black Panther Party in court against the racist police and other agencies who set out to destroy our movement as part of the federal government’s illegal Cointelpro pogrom.  People were surprised, but not us, that Johnnie was willing to come to the fore of our struggle for Reparations.

In 1975, while I was imprisoned on San Quentin’s Death Row, he and I began to dialogue via mail about the legal predicates regarding the money owed the descendants of African slaves. Johnnie was impressed with the arguments being made under international law, and the legitimacy of our right to reparations as was being taught by the great legal minds of Imari Obadele and Chokwe Lumumba.

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