Everyone knows Michael Jackson the entertainer. Fewer people know how much of his money he gave away out of the spotlight, and almost nobody realizes that one of those gifts is still changing lives right now, four decades later.
It started with one of the scariest moments of his life. In 1984, while filming a Pepsi commercial, pyrotechnics set his hair on fire and left him with serious burns. Pepsi paid him a settlement of around 1.5 million dollars. Michael did not keep a cent of it. He gave the whole amount to the hospital that treated him, which named its children’s burn center in his honor.
That could have been the end of a generous story. For Michael it was only the start.
Two years later, in 1986, he took another 1.5 million dollars and did something with it that most people have never heard about. He set up a scholarship fund through the United Negro College Fund, built to help young people chasing careers in communications and the performing arts, the kind of kids who dream of the stage and the studio the way he once had.
Here is the part that gives people chills. That fund did not fade away after he died in 2009. It is still running today. Every year it helps a new group of students at UNCF colleges, with awards of up to 4,000 dollars each, almost forty years after he created it. Young people who were not even born when Michael was alive are walking across campus right now partly because of a decision he made in 1986.
It fits the message he sang about for most of his life. He always said that if you want to change the world, you start by looking at the person in the glass:
Michael Jackson – Man In The Mirror (Official Video)
That was not just a lyric to him. The man who filled stadiums spent decades handing his money to burn wards, children’s hospitals and classrooms, often without a camera in sight. He gave to so many different causes that he holds a Guinness World Record for it, the most charities ever supported by a pop star. See how far his giving reached:
Michael Jackson – Highest Donor for the Charity on Earth (CNN)
So the next time someone says they know everything about Michael Jackson, tell them about the students he is still quietly putting through school, long after the music stopped. Behind the showman was one of the most generous people his industry has ever seen, and most of it he did with no cameras around at all.