Man in the mirror

On Tuesday morning I headed over to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills to cover Michael Jackson's funeral. Of course, this proved to be an almost impossible task, with freeway traffic snarled, off ramps blocked and roads around the cemetery closed to the public.

By the time I got there a little before 7 a.m., about 75 people were already standing around outside. TV news vans had been parked along the street for a few days by then. The crowd was surprisingly somber; instead of carrying on like rabid fans might for an appearance by the King of Pop, everyone here fell silent as the black hearse containing Michael's remains pulled up to the giant iron gates at the front of this cemetery to the stars. In a few hours, the same hearse would take Michael's coffin to Staples Center for a memorial service attended by family members, friends and about 20,000 fans.

Over the past two weeks, perhaps billions of people around the world have been obsessing on Michael's life and death. And the story of his demise - possibly from alleged prescription drug abuse - now includes an active LAPD probe, which is sure to capture even more headlines in the coming months. The media circus surrounding Michael's death continues July 20 in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles at a hearing concerning the guardianship of Michael's three children: Prince Michael, 12; Paris-Michael Katherine, 11; and Blanket (Prince Michael II), 7.

Yes, there is surely much more to come out about the life of this troubled man. But on Tuesday morning, as family members were leaving Forest Lawn for Staples Center, I was feeling like a hypocrite. You see, like many other African Americans, I loved Michael for his music and all the good things that he represented. But I also denigrated Michael, an entertainer who rose to unimaginable heights but came to be ridiculed by many, including me, for a slew of sex scandals involving young boys.

In 1969, at about the same age as some of his alleged victims, Michael was taking the music world by storm as lead singer of the Jackson 5, the last great group to come out of Motown's Hitsville USA in Detroit, making history when its first four songs - "I Want You Back," "ABC," "The Love You Save" and "I'll Be There" - rocketed to No. 1 on the American music charts.

After Jermaine left the group for a solo career at Motown in 1975, brother Randy took his place and the group was renamed The Jacksons, now on another label. Michael's career seemed to fade as he reached manhood, and most of his post-Jackson 5 music was relegated to black radio stations.

But fading into obscurity wasn't in the cards for this man. His album "Off the Wall" dominated the charts in 1980, and in 1984 he took the world by storm with the biggest album of all time, "Thriller," which sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, with seven of its nine songs reaching the Top 10, and won Jackson a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards.

"Michael was bigger than life," Mika Wright said outside of Forest Lawn Tuesday. Wright traveled here from England after she heard the news about Jackson's death. "It's like Princess Diana. They tore her down also. It's because they haven't done anything themselves."

No one doubted that Michael really was larger than life. But many African Americans had long been questioning not only Michael's sexuality but whether he actually even wanted to be black, with his skin for some reason (he said medical) becoming lighter and lighter over the years.

Eventually, Michael became the target of ridicule, with other African Americans like Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy building parts of their acts around the claims of child molestation that Jackson faced in 1993 and again a decade later - the first case ending out of court with a $20 million settlement, and Jackson being acquitted of all criminal charges the second time around.

As Michael's criminal trial in Santa Barbara wore on, African-American supporters became more and more scarce. Maybe that explains why his albums by this time were selling better overseas than in America. "Invincible" sold only 6 million copies worldwide, all around the time many people were labeling Michael a freakish pedophile.

"There is this ongoing thing, I think people call it the crab syndrome," said Pastor Lucius Smith of the Friendship Baptist Church in Old Pasadena, who was asked by Randy Jackson to speak at Michael Jackson's memorial at Staples Center. "When one of the crabs tries to crawl out of the pot, the other crabs reach up and pull him down. We celebrate people that reflect us, look like us and sound like us. When a person does what we want, we are on their team. When they deviate, we can be overly critical. I think it is amplified just because of the many struggles the African-American community have had to deal with and may have to deal with for a long time."

Michael knew about some of those struggles all too well. During the height of his popularity, he was regularly seen with white female stars such as Brooke Shields and Elizabeth Taylor. Then again, he also kept the company of underage boys like "Home Alone" star McCauley Culken and Emanuel Lewis from the TV show "Webster." Both have steadfastly claimed that Michael never did anything inappropriate to them.

But back then, his sexuality took a backseat in importance to his overall look and his apparent attempts to turn himself white.

"There were concerns we heard in the community about him denying his ethnicity. I think some of the audience did turn their backs on him," said Joe Brown, head of the NAACP Pasadena Branch. "But his music overshadowed what he looked like."

Whether he liked it, or even sensed it, Michael was a leader. And "We have never been used to having a leader," Brown said. The danger of criticizing Michael is "once you destroy a leader that speaks on behalf of the masses - and I am talking about in athletics, politics and entertainment - you silence his voice. We tend to look for those things that discredit what they bring to the world. It was done to Martin, Malcolm, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali."

Whatever he really was behind all of the controversies, Michael's talent and musical legacy cannot be denied. He has inspired just about every musician to come along in the past 20 years, and although he didn't invent music videos, he revolutionized them.

The last American celebrity death to cause this kind of public reaction was in 1977 when hundreds of thousands of people poured into Memphis after Elvis Presley died, supposedly from complications related to drug addictions, much the like the situation involving Michael, who at one point was married to the previous "King's" daughter, Lisa Marie.

But none of that seemed to matter all that much to his fans on Tuesday morning.

"Michael Jackson is the greatest entertainer of all time," said Robert Gaines of Los Angeles, who found his way to Forest Lawn to witness history. "Nobody can touch him. Nobody will ever do what he did; not once, but twice. He was a star as a little boy in the Jackson 5, then became a bigger star when he grew up. Most people can't do it once; he did it twice, and if he had lived, he probably would have done it again."

In August, Jackson was scheduled to perform the first of 50 scheduled concerts at the O2 Arena in London, tickets to all of them already sold-out.

"The world stopped when Michael Jackson died," Marcus Hayes, also of Los Angeles, said outside the cemetery. "Everybody will remember where they were when they heard the news."

Maybe when we remember the death of Michael Jackson, we'll also think of our role in his life - how we tied his success to our sense of worth, and what we did to Michael as consumers of pop culture that helped turn him into both a superstar and such a tortured soul.