THEY HAD already heard tributes from Nelson Mandela and Diana Ross and a specially written poem by Maya Angelou and watched Mariah Carey performing I'll Be There, but it was a series of images on a video screen that first brought the crowd at Los Angeles's vast Staples Center to its feet.
The fast-moving compilation showed Michael Jackson as a child star, a handsome young black man and in the many mutations of his later years. But all anybody noticed was his soaring, soulful voice and his unparalleled dance moves that seemed to defy the laws of dynamics.
“The more I think about Michael Jackson, the more I think The King of Pop is not big enough for him,” Motown founder Berry Gordy had said a few minutes earlier. “I think he is simply the greatest entertainer that ever lived.”
Before the memorial service began, images of Jackson flashed on a giant screen at the back of a stage laden at the front with banks of flowers. Jackson’s brothers, each wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a yellow tie and a single, silver, sequined glove, carried the dead singer’s casket to the foot of the stage.
In the front row, surrounded by 17,500 of Jackson’s fans, sat his father Joe, his mother Katherine and his three children, Prince Michael, Paris and Blanket. Celebrities included Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Usher, Jennifer Hudson and actor Brooke Shields.
From the start, however, it was clear that the memorial service was not just a celebration of Jackson as an entertainer, but as a black man. A gospel choir performed a number of times during the event and one speaker after another stressed Jackson’s role as an African- American pioneer.
“He never gave up dreaming. It was that dream that changed culture all over the world,” civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton declared in a fiery eulogy.
At every pause in the 2½ hour event, fans shouted “We love you, Michael” and Shields and Usher appeared overcome with emotion as they took the stage. The most affecting moment came at the end, however, when Jackson’s 12-year-old daughter Paris broke down in tears as she gave the final tribute to her father. “Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could imagine and I just want to say I love him very much,” she said.
Nobody mentioned directly the child abuse allegations that dominated Jackson, but Sharpton had a pointed message for the dead singer’s children. “I want his children to know: there wasn’t nothing strange about your Daddy,” he said. “It was strange what your Daddy had to deal with. But he dealt with it anyway.”
The video montage that brought the crowd to its feet early in the service included images of lurid tabloid headlines about Jackson’s cosmetic surgery and his private life and just a few spoken words from the star himself.
“I must say, it’s good to be thought of as a person, not a personality,” he said.