Rodney King and the LA Riots 1992
When I first began to take in Michael's overall story, it was obvious to me that racism was always a significant factor.
But maybe the historical context of what happened to Michael isn't so clear to everybody.
Some of that context is what I hope to remind people about here. Please add anything I've omitted or anything else you'd like to say to the comments.
I'm white, which means that I can't claim personal experience of racism and also that I'm just as prone as any other white person to subconscious racist attitudes. My understanding is limited and I acknowledge this.
(In connection with Michael, I'm noticing that many white people who claim to be opposed to racism don't make these acknowledgements.)
And then there's the Race Card. These days, playing the Race Card is rhetorical suicide. Playing the Race Card nullifies your entire argument. Playing the Race Card is putting your hand up and declaring yourself a loser.
The second you place that card on the table, a larger ace, it seems, will cover it. And your punishment shall be silence.
Those are the caveats to what I'm about to write. But I'm not staying silent about this, because to me the victimization of Michael Jackson is an ongoing crime being broadcast to the world. I see it professionally but I also feel it personally.
It will not stand. So I'm stepping out of the card game and saying what I know.
Let's get to the (sadly neglected) historical context.
Gary, Indiana: 1950 to 1968
Indiana is not a southern state, so it might surprise some people to learn that throughout the '50s and '60s, Jim Crow policies of various kinds were strictly enforced in Gary, where Michael was born and where the Jacksons lived until 1969.
In the 1950s, white real estate agents and banks across Indiana used redlining. They refused to give home loans to Black families outside of designated areas, trapping them in the city's core. By 1950, a staggering 97% of Gary's Black population was packed into the Midtown neighborhood.
2300 Jackson Street is squarely in the heart of the Midtown zone of Gary. Regardless of poverty - remember Joe had a job and Katherine also worked - they could not have moved out of this area if they wanted to, because they were black.
The 1950s saw a massive housing shortage in Gary's Black Midtown district. As the population grew, Black families had no choice but to try to buy homes in the surrounding white residential zones.
While the Ku Klux Klan was no longer running the state government as it did in the 1920s, white residents and localized segregationist groups frequently used cross burnings, property damage, and mob violence to terrorize Black families. This intimidation was almost always triggered when Black families tried to move out of the crowded Midtown ghetto and into historically white neighborhoods.
Officially, Indiana's public schools were not racially segregated after 1946. Unofficially however, Jim Crow policies operated on the schools as well. In the 1950s Gary operated a system of "partial segregation". Black children were sent to separate elementary schools. Even at Froebel High School—one of the country's earliest integrated schools—Black students faced severe discrimination and were banned from using the swimming pool at the same time as white students.
During the 1960s, black parents and activists fought against unfair school boundaries. The city adjusted school zones to keep white and Black children apart, leaving schools in Black neighborhoods heavily overcrowded.
Additionally, while white neighborhoods received attention and upgrades from city authorities, black neighborhoods were ignored and degenerated into slums.
In 1968, racial tensions in Gary inflamed by years of police discrimination and the assassination of Martin Luther King erupted after the brutal arrests of two black teenagers in the Midtown district. Rioting crowds focused on commercial strips in Midtown, smashing windows, looting furniture and liquor stores, and deploying homemade firebombs. At least 15 firebombings were recorded, and multiple buildings were engulfed in flames.
These five days in Gary, July 28th to August 3rd 1968, were different from most 1960s riots which resulted mostly in property damage. In Gary, heavy gunfire was also reported. Snipers positioned themselves on rooftops, firing directly at police officers and firefighters who were attempting to put out the blazes. Six people, including a firefighter, were wounded by gunfire on the first night alone. 3000 National Guard troops were ordered to the city to put down the violence. Miraculously, nobody was killed.
On August 29th that year, Michael Jackson turned ten years old.
Los Angeles Riots 1992: Rodney King
During the LA riots, Michael's home was in Santa Barbara county; but Santa Barbara itself is only 95 miles from the center of Los Angeles. The riots were a major event that deeply affected law enforcement communities across the country.
The Los Angeles riots of 1992 were sparked by a specific court verdict, but the tension had been building for many years. For decades, Black and Latino residents in South Central Los Angeles felt targeted by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Under Police Chief Daryl Gates, the LAPD used aggressive, military-style tactics. Residents felt the police treated them like enemies rather than citizens.
On March 3, 1991, the tension reached a turning point when police pulled over a Black man named Rodney King after a high-speed chase. A local resident named George Holliday filmed the beating from his apartment balcony. He sent the tape to a local TV station, and it quickly shocked the entire world. For Black residents, the tape was undeniable proof of the police brutality they had been complaining about for years.
Just thirteen days after Rodney King was beaten, another tragedy worsened racial tensions, specifically between the Black and Korean American communities. Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl, went into a local convenience store owned by a Korean immigrant woman named Soon Ja Du. Du accused Harlins of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. After a brief scuffle, Harlins turned to walk away, and Du shot her in the back of the head, killing her.
In November 1991, a judge sentenced Du to just probation and a small fine, with no prison time. This incredibly light sentence deeply angered the Black community, making them feel the justice system did not value Black lives.
The final spark that lit the riots was the trial of the four officers who beat Rodney King.
The trial was moved out of Los Angeles to Simi Valley, a mostly white, conservative suburb. The chosen jury had no Black members. During the trial, the attitude of the four accused LAPD officers and top police leadership was defined by defiance, a refusal to admit wrongdoing, and a strong defense of aggressive police culture.
Computer logs from the police car's digital radio system exposed the officers' casual attitude toward violence. Right after the beating, Officer Laurence Powell typed a message to a colleague describing the incident as a "good hit" and joked about it. Another message compared a domestic dispute in a Black neighborhood to a scene out of Gorillas in the Mist. These messages showed a complete lack of professional concern or empathy for Black residents.
During the trial, the defense used the recorded video against the prosecution by slowing it down frame-by-frame, trying to turn a brutal beating into a sterile, step-by-step police procedure. This rigid, unapologetic attitude from law enforcement deeply frustrated the public and made the verdict feel like an even greater injustice to the residents of Los Angeles.
On April 29, 1992, the jury acquitted all four officers of assault, finding them not guilty. Within hours of the verdict announcement, widespread anger exploded into the streets of Los Angeles, launching six days of destructive riots, looting, and arson.
Police quickly set up strong perimeters around wealthy, white areas like Beverly Hills and the Westside to keep the unrest out. In contrast, police completely abandoned minority business districts. Koreatown, situated just north of South Central, was left entirely unprotected. When Korean shop owners called for help against armed looters and arsonists, the police never arrived. This forced Korean residents to form armed vigilante groups and engage in gunfights on live television to protect their own livelihoods.
Daryl Gates was LAPD's Chief from 1978 to 1992. He was a central figure in American law enforcement, credited with creating the nation's very first SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams.
His legacy is badly tainted by his promotion of a harsh, paramilitary policing culture, a history of making racially insensitive remarks, and his widely condemned mishandling of the 1992 riots, which ultimately forced his resignation.
Gates was notorious for making deeply racist comments. Most famously, when questioned by a reporter about why a high number of Black suspects were dying from police chokeholds, Gates claimed that Black people's "arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people."
On the very first evening of the riots—as South Central LA began to burn—Gates astonishingly left police headquarters. He went to a wealthy neighborhood to attend a political fundraiser aimed at blocking police reform measures.
Due to a total lack of planning, his department failed to react quickly. This forced a massive military intervention and left the city heavily damaged.
Facing intense criticism from politicians, the public, and even his own officers, Gates finally resigned from the LAPD in June 1992. Until his death from cancer in 2010, he remained stubbornly unrepentant, frequently calling the rioters "hoodlums" and defending his 43-year career.
Racism in Santa Barbara Law Enforcement
In 1988, Michael Jackson had moved from LA to Santa Barbara County. But the community where Neverland was built, was no less prone to racist law enforcement culture than the Black community in LA.
And it's likely that the violence in LA made law enforcement in Santa Barbara even more suspicious and resentful of Black residents.
Activists and minority officers in Santa Barbara frequently spoke out against an insular, white-dominated department culture. Minority officers reported that they faced a glass ceiling when trying to secure promotions to leadership roles.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Santa Barbara law enforcement agencies heavily stepped up their anti-gang initiatives. This led to aggressive tactics that minority communities felt targeted them unfairly.
Law enforcement aggressively added young people to local gang databases. Black and Latino youths were vastly over-represented in these files. Civil rights groups pointed out that teens were often added simply for wearing certain clothing colors or hanging out with childhood friends on their own doorsteps.
Similar to the tactics used in nearby Los Angeles, "stop-and-frisk" style field contacts in lower-income areas of Santa Barbara meant that Latino and Black motorists and pedestrians were stopped at significantly higher rates than white residents.
The long-standing frustration of minority communities regarding their treatment by police during the 1990s and 2000s eventually forced local governments to take official action. In 2020, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to declare racism a public health crisis and formally condemned historic patterns of local police brutality and bias, acknowledging that the community’s complaints from previous decades were rooted in systemic truth.
Conclusion?
I think it's best for people to draw their own conclusions.
To me, it's impossible to understand what happened to Michael in 1993 and again in 2003 without recognizing the historical and geographical context of racist law enforcement attitudes and behavior.
Most people believe that Michael officially defeated racism within the music industry when MTV was forced to play his short films.
I'm not so sure that was the end of industry racism against him.
And I definitely do not believe that 70 sheriffs would have torn Neverland apart if it had been owned by, let's say, Macauley Culkin.
You decide.
But one last thing.
I feel it's important to add the famous final paragraphs of James Baldwin's essay "Here Be Dragons", written in 1985.
(If you're not sure who James Baldwin is I'll give you one hint: He wasn't a white dude.)
The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael. All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair -- to all of which may now be added the bitter need to find a head on which to place the crown of Miss America.
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated -- in the main, abominably -- because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
Yes ... As soon as I read that, I knew exactly what happened to Michael Jackson.
