Leo Branton Jr.

Leo Branton Jr. (born February 17, 1922 in Pine Bluff , Arkansas ; died April 19, 2013 in Los Angeles ) was an American attorney who was best known as a criminal defense attorney for civil rights activists like Angela Davis in the 1960s and 1970s .

Life

Branton grew up in his hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, studied at Tennessee State University ( BA 1942) and then did military service in a segregated unit of the US Army . In 1948, he was the only African American of the class to receive his JD from Northwestern University School of Law . Branton specialized early on in politically explosive cases and so from 1952 defended five Californian communists in several sensational trials, who were accused of planning a coup d'état, and in 1957 achieved the overturning of the guilty verdict from the first instance before the Supreme Court of the United States . In 1957 he also represented the jazz singer Nat King Cole in a copyright lawsuit and achieved that Cole regained possession of his recordings for the Capitol Records label . The high point of his career was the murder trial of the black civil rights activist and communist Angela Davis in 1972, where he was able to convince the jury (which consisted of whites throughout) to acquittal through his pleadings.

In 2011 he received the William Robert Ming Advocacy Award from the NAACP .

Web links

• William Yardley: Leo Branton Jr., Activists' Lawyer, Dies at 91 . In: The New York Times (online edition) April 27, 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Benjamin Todd Jealous: Memorandum to NAACP Units and State Conferences (pdf) NAACP. January 2012. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 23, 2013.