PolitiFact – Attorney Johnnie Cochran died from a brain tumor, not because of reparations fight

O.J. Simpson, Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg are among the high-profile celebrities whom lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr. defended in court. But Cochran’s legal work to advance slavery reparations before his 2005 death has become fodder for a baseless conspiracy theory. 

“Before Johnnie Cochran mysteriously passed away he was sueing (sic) the government for slavery reparations,” read the caption on a Feb. 22. Instagram post. Comments on the video suggest a conspiratorial link between his death and the reparations work.

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Cochran’s death at home in Los Angeles is hardly a mystery. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in December 2003 and died from its complications in March 2005 at age 67. In 2007, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles opened the Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. Brain Tumor Center in memory of Cochran, who had received treatment at the hospital.

Cochran was part of a group formed in 2000 called Reparations Assessment Group, which hoped to pursue reparations from local and national governments and public and private companies that benefited from the enslavement of Black people.

In 2003, the group filed a lawsuit on behalf of the victims and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a mob of white people killed hundreds of residents in the predominantly Black community of Greenwood, nicknamed America’s Black Wall Street. The lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, its police department and the state of Oklahoma was dismissed by a district federal court and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

There is no evidence Cochran’s death from cancer is in any way associated with his work in this area. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!