Jackson Goes Home to the Black Community
By Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is a correspondent for NPR's newsmagazine "Day to Day."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Robert Frost made those lines famous in his poem "The Death of the Hired Man," and Michael Jackson, radiating scandal from his second charge of child molestation, has taken these lines to heart.

The boyish man who is best friends with Elizabeth Taylor, married Elvis' only daughter and was accompanied to galas by a chimp named Bubbles, has added new friends to the retinue — the Nation of Islam and Al Sharpton. And some in the black community find that timing awfully interesting.

"Well, you didn't see him with a lot of black people before all this happened," noted one woman, a banker. "But now here he is, showing up, wanting to connect with black folks. And we let him, because we are forgiving people."

Another once-popular black man would have to agree with that. O.J. Simpson's criminal trial split much of Los Angeles — and the country — along racial fault lines. After he was accused of murdering his former wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, the genial Simpson became persona non grata in many of the white circles in which he had happily traveled. Once considered "colorless" by virtue of his fame and wealth, Simpson quickly found that the support from whites whose admiration he craved had eroded to virtually nothing.

But he had not run out of communities entirely. Some of the black venues in which Simpson had been noticeably scarce greeted him with open arms. Media reports covering his movements during his criminal trial showed how diners applauded when he showed up at the Boulevard Café, a now-defunct restaurant on Martin Luther King Boulevard that served as a nerve center for buzz in the largely black Crenshaw community. He got hugs when he visited black churches — also places that, pre-crisis, he was not known to frequent.

Now Jackson, noticeably paler of skin, thinner of nose and straighter of hair than back in the day when his music lived at the top of the charts, seems to be considering where "home" is.