Johnnie Cochran: L.A. quintessential

In one of the greatest of his late poems, "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," Yeats described coming suddenly upon one of his friends' portraits:

"And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man."

That was the line that came to mind this week, when, after a long illness, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. died at the untimely age of 67. We were friends for many years and collaborated on his bestselling memoir, "Journey to Justice."

O.J. Simpson's acquittal made Johnnie an archetypal celebrity lawyer, and, in recent years, media commentators tended to forget that he was a celebrity because of his legal skill and not simply a celebrity with "law school" on his resume.

All the peripatetic activity and bicoastal living of his post-Simpson years notwithstanding, it really was impossible for the media or anyone else to understand Johnnie or his career except as a part of Los Angeles' postwar history. He was a deeply rooted man -- in his Baptist church and closely knit family, in Los Angeles' African American community and in the wider life of the city itself. That rootedness made him a man of joyful conviction and boundless confidence.

His view of the world was shaped decisively by the paradox of black Los Angeles in the years following World War II. To immigrant African Americans from the South, like the Cochran family, this was a city of unexpected and bountiful promise. But it was a promise on which the majority white community was determined to set firm limits. Enforcement of those barriers was the task of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose ranks then Chief William Parker filled with ex-servicemen, most from the South and Southwest.

To an extent not true in any other American city, the story of black progress among Angelenos of Cochran's generation was a tale of struggle against the racism of the LAPD, and his conduct of Simpson's defense was simply one more battle in that struggle. Paradoxically, though the city remained residentially segregated for decades after the war, it also was a place where interracial contacts and friendships flourished with a frequency and intensity rare in other large American cities.

Thus Cochran, a product of a then nearly all-white Los Angeles High School, UCLA and Loyola Law School, could become -- as one poll a few years ago found -- the most recognizable black man in America along with Louis Farrakhan, while at the same time living a life in which his closest personal friends were white and Jewish. It simply never occurred to him that those friendships were in any way precluded by his abiding concern for the African American community.