“1969 was the year the social floodgates opened and an 11-year-old led the charge in post-Malcolm/Martin/Motown America. “The Jacksons were the first family in line to truly benefit from the post-civil-rights era with America’s new open-arms policy toward black entertainment,” says ?uestlove.
The Jackson 5 were the last great act to come out of the Detroit label, further proof of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory in Outliers: The Story of Success that life timing is critical to success, that the historical forces swirling around the moment when you emerge can make all the difference. If Berry Gordy said it was good enough to release, you could bet it was great. Michael had a second family: Motown was a deeply trusted brand in millions of black households. Al Sharpton, “all talented and all cute and the strong father and the mother who was matriarchal and Janet, and it was like, ‘Wow, all this talent in this family, showing we could do something.’ We were proud of that.” “Here you had Michael and four brothers,” says the Rev. Jay-Z told me he grew up pretending to be Michael, singing alongside his two older sisters and brother. A few years after the Johnson administration declared the black family broken with the Moynihan Report, the Jackson family was large, intact, vibrant, successful and seemingly happy, giving America an idealized image of domestic bliss. You didn’t want anything to happen to him so much that you felt protective the way you did about a younger brother. Black people fell in love so hard, he became more than an artist and more like a member of the family. The first four Jackson 5 singles each topped Billboard‘s Hot 100, an unbelievable start. He quickly became the number-one black child star of his era, and of all time. If Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder had a child, it would have been Michael Jackson.” “He was some sort of test-tube creation from a mad soul doctor’s lab. “Here was a child who clearly understood the R&B idiom,” says music-industry veteran Gary Harris. Martin Luther King Jr., a time when the black-power and civil rights movements seemed to be disintegrating, but Michael showed up, a soul-music prodigy irrepressibly optimistic and bursting with youthful enthusiasm.
1969 was a year after the assassination of Dr. “People responded viscerally to Michael Jackson’s beauty,” says Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. He was cherubic with his rich brown skin, a broad nose and a big halo of curls atop his head at a time when the Afro was a powerful symbol of black pride. In 1969, as black people were getting comfortable with the idea that African features are gorgeous, he arrived as the perfect punctuation of that idea. When Michael Jackson was a boy, you didn’t have to say “black is beautiful,” you just had to look at him and you knew.
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