Brittany Luce

But before he got to that, he seized the moment to address the pending lawsuit filed against him the previous year

based on allegations of child sex abuse.

I have been strengthened in my fight to prove my innocence by my faith in God and by the knowledge that I am not fighting this battle alone.

These weren't his first public remarks on the issue.

A couple weeks earlier, he declared his innocence in a satellite video from Neverland Ranch.

And there he described being humiliated by the investigation into the claims.

But that was a statement meant for the world.

His speech at the NAACP Awards was something way more specific.

It was MJ code-switching, preaching directly to the Black Choir, as it were.

So at this point, the crowd erupted into huge applause before he could even finish the sentence.

And then... Everyone is presumed to be innocent and totally innocent until they are charged with a crime and then convicted by a jury of their peers.

He was telling this audience, my struggle is our struggle.

Or put another way, I'm still Black.

This moment crystallized what Jackson had been working towards for much of the late 1980s and into the early 90s.

It took five years for his follow-up to Thriller, and by the time Bad came out in 1987, the music landscape had shifted.

Hip-hop and New Jack Swing were emerging as dominant expressions of Black culture.

That's Carvel Wallace, a culture critic.

Now, Carvel witnessed much of Jackson's ascension in real time and understood why his attempts to stay relevant continued to work, in spite of everything that was going on with him personally.

By the late 80s, Jackson's look had shifted too.

The cherubic brown kid that the world had first fallen in love with now resembled his dear friend and idol Elizabeth Taylor.