MJ

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PHOTOGRAPHS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT STEVE KNOPPER

NOTES

INDEX

For Melissa and Rose

T
he trouble began when a janitor forgot to unlock the auditorium doors at Emerson High School, in Gary, Indiana, on September 26, 1927. A crowd gathered in the hallway and waited for first period to begin. Then two African-American students walked by. A white kid blurted out:
“Let’s get out of here until they get rid of the niggers.”

Within hours, six hundred white Emerson students, some on the football team, were parading down the streets of northern Gary, chanting,
“Strike! Strike! Strike!” and “We won’t go back until Emerson’s white!”
Strikers in cars drove in circles, honking horns, disturbing the peace, frightening passersby. The local
Post-Tribune
sensationalized the crisis, printing bold headlines:
‘E’ STRIKERS VOTE TO REMAIN ‘OUT.’

It seems
William A. Wirt, the superintendent who had run the Gary schools since the city had opened for business twenty years earlier, had miscalculated. Before the semester began, he realized Gary’s black schools didn’t have enough space to accommodate the three thousand African-American students enrolled in the fall, so he relocated
fifty of them to a handful of white schools. Emerson received eighteen. (It wasn’t Emerson’s first influx of black students, but school officials had carefully screened the few earlier kids for what they considered
high intelligence, good manners, and light skin, so as not to attract too much attention.) The superintendent insisted segregation did not belong in Gary, but he took no action against the strikers.

The students’ ringleader, Winfield “Junior” Eshelman, was a member of the swim team who wore a blue-and-white athletic sweater and calmly delivered his demands to the press and school officials. “The strikers are firm in their
belief that a colored line must be drawn, and Emerson made a white school,” Eshelman said. Facing mayoral pressure to resolve the problem, Wirt and Gary’s city council
compromised. They granted the strikers “excused absences.” They transferred fifteen of the eighteen black students to temporary schools. They set up a temporary school facility for blacks with $15,000 in city money. And they agreed to allocate $600,000 to build a permanent all-black school, far away from Emerson. The
Post-Tribune
was euphoric:
STRIKE OFF; ALL HAPPY
.

Gary, Indiana, had not been built for
African-Americans. Once a region of swampy marshland and sandy dunes, Gary’s location on the lower shore of Lake Michigan attracted oil and steel companies at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1907, oilmen bought nine thousand acres of land and announced plans to spend $65 million on massive plants. U.S. Steel would provide living quarters for loyal workers.

The steel giant’s Gary Land Company built 506 houses and quickly added more, but at
fourteen dollars per month, even the cheapest homes were too expensive for the mill workers, who made 16.7 cents an hour. By 1911, overcrowding was a problem.
Garbage was everywhere. Barely born, Gary was quickly segregating into two cities, for rich and poor. The former, on the north side, contained tony establishments such as the Binzenhof pub and the Hotel Gary. The latter would attract
two hundred saloons over three years, with names like Jack Johnson’s Gambling Joint and the Bucket of Blood. Executives and skilled workers called this southern part of town the Patch, or the Other Gary.

The all-black
Roosevelt High School, created from
segregation, opened in the heart of the Other Gary on April 19, 1931. Eighteen
years later, across a narrow alley from Roosevelt’s track field, a one-story house would appear on the corner of Jackson Street and West Twenty-Third Avenue. It was roughly thirty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, with ten tall windows, impeccable white siding, and a brick chimney at the top. The address was 2300 Jackson Street. Within a couple of years, Joseph Jackson, a construction worker, would use his
savings and some money from his new wife’s stepfather to buy the tiny house, as well as a refrigerator, a stove, and a bed. Joseph and Katherine would raise nine children—six boys and three girls. The oldest boy would play baseball for Roosevelt High. He and four of his brothers would sing “My Girl” at a talent show in the Roosevelt auditorium. One of the youngest brothers would spin around and around and around, mesmerizing the audience.

*  *  *

Years later, Michael Jackson argued with
Rupert Wainwright, director of one of his short films—a teaser video for the
HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1
album. Michael wanted to display a four-hundred-foot statue of himself in the film. Wainwright gently pushed back: “Some people might think it’s slightly vainglorious,” the British director told him. They went back and forth. “Verbal fisticuffs,” is how Wainwright describes it. He assured MJ he’d be happier if the image were abstract, as opposed to the King of Pop celebrating his own legend. Michael disagreed. It had been thirty years since Michael had been the kid from the segregated
Gary neighborhood who’d barely seen Chicago, much less the rest of the world. He’d spent his first five or six years on the planet with nothing but walls and boundaries, and by 1995 he wanted no limits at all. He refused to let race, gender, musical styles, family, even his own facial structure constrict him. Every time somebody tried to define him, he literally shifted his shape, altering his music, his clothes, his image, his nose. On albums, he wanted sounds that had never been made before. He wanted to sell more records than any musician, ever. He could heal the world, make it a better place,
comfort the sick, save the environment, bring the children into his home, turn their fears and anxieties into joy. “
With These Words,” he wrote in the liner notes to
HIStory
, “I Lovingly Dedicate This Album Of My Music To All The Children Of The World.” The capital letters were not vainglorious. They were just how Michael Jackson thought. He was bigger than the world, and he used his powers for good. Why not a four-hundred-foot statue?

Jackson told Wainwright the statue wasn’t so much a representation of himself as it was a “symbol of music.” Wainwright said that was worse than a statue. Michael called him dumb. Wainwright said maybe he was. How many records had Wainwright sold?

“You have lots of statues where you’re from,” Michael finally told the director.

“I live in LA,” Wainwright said, confused.

“In England, you have statues. You have statues of
that woman
all over the place.”

“Which woman?”

“The queen.”

B
y training, Joe Jackson was a craneman. His job in East Chicago, Indiana, was to sit in a metal cab about the size of a freight elevator, twenty or thirty feet off the ground, using the huge jaws of his crane to move heavy ingots onto buggies. He had no choice but to work in the mills. Almost every African-American man in the Gary region did back then, unless he was lucky enough to find work as a schoolteacher or had enough entrepreneurial gumption to open a radio station or record store.
“It was said there were only three outcomes to life in Gary: The Mill, prison or death,” Joe’s son, Jermaine, would say.

Joe was lucky—
crane operator wasn’t especially tough work. But in the shower at the end of every day, Joe dreamed of
show business. He wanted to be an actor.

Joe had arrived in Gary in the late forties. He was from the South, and he took a train to get there, like the
six million African-Americans who were part of the Great Migration. Blues musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and Buddy Guy were part of this exodus, which lasted from 1910 to 1970, hauling their guitars in
beat-up cases, carrying vague visions of changing music forever, or at least making a few bucks.

Joe’s route north was more indirect. Born July 26, 1929, Joe grew up in the tiny fishing town of Dermott, Arkansas. Slavery complicated his lineage. Joe’s great-grandfather, July “Jack” Gale, a Native American medicine man and a US Army scout, married a black slave named Gina during the years before the Civil War. Their first child, Israel, was born a slave, too. Israel—known as “Nero, son of Jack,” which evolved into Nero Jackson—was
“light-skinned and tall, with high cheekbones and small, twinkly eyes,” as Joe wrote in his autobiography. He was eventually sold to a Louisiana plantation, where he was forced to eat from a trough. When
Nero tried to escape, the plantation owner clamped his nostrils with hot tongs until he fainted.

After the Civil War, Nero became a free man and bought nearly three hundred acres on a farm in
Amite County, Mississippi, where he found and married a woman named Emmaline and raised fifteen children—the rare African-American couple in Mississippi able to raise a
family on their own land. “He could probably pass for white, the way his picture looked,” says Thomas Jackson III, one of his descendants. Nero was known for his singing, and on Saturday evenings he performed Choctaw war dances at the center of town, prompting occasional sheriff visits for disturbing the peace. In 1920, oilmen apparently realized Nero’s land was sitting on top of oil reserves; the Jacksons leased a portion of their land for $200 a year. But Nero, sadly, never saw the profits. He died in 1924,
and his heirs sold his Mississippi plot during the Depression to pay taxes.
Joe Jackson, always one to lament a lost fortune, estimated drilling rights would be worth
$100 million today.

Nero’s youngest son, Samuel, went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Alcorn University, then walked two hundred miles to apply for a teaching job in Ashley County, Arkansas. Professor Jackson, as most locals called him, fell in love with one of his students, Chrystal,
who had a “radiant smile, a loud laugh and a lively personality,” and married her when she turned sixteen. He built a house by chopping down trees; he borrowed a horse to pull a plow, and raised vegetables in a huge garden.
Samuel and Chrystal had six children. Joseph Walter was the oldest. They were strict and not above corporal punishment.
“My mom put the spanking on me, and my dad put the spanking on me,” recalls Joe’s younger brother Martin Luther Jackson. “He said, ‘Boy, you gotta stay out of jail.’ ”

Joe attended Dermott, an elementary and high school hybrid, where
beatings were routine. Stumbling home with welts on his back, Joe dreamed of fame. One day, during a class talent contest, he picked a spiritual he’d heard from his father, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and nervously stood up to sing despite jeering and laughter from the other kids.
“I was so scared that I sang faster and faster, in order to finish and sit down again,” Joe recalled. Finally, he slunk back to his seat, humiliated. But his teacher took him aside and insisted they were laughing because he was nervous, not because he was bad.

Joe’s little sister
Verna Mae was smart and precocious, a “little housewife” who made the
beds and dusted all the rooms before her mother came home from work. At age seven, Verna Mae read stories to Joe and his younger brother Lawrence by kerosene lamp. Then she developed a mysterious illness. She became so weak she couldn’t hold a spoon. Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and her condition worsened every day. But she remained cheerful, even at the end: “Everything’s fine,” she kept telling her family. She died when Joseph was eleven. “As far as my understanding goes,”
Jermaine Jackson said, “that was the last time he shed a tear.”