Michael Jackson Registered Voters: Celebrity Activism We Could Use Today
On July 4, 1984, at the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City, Missouri, Executive Director Benjamin Hooks made a surprising announcement to register one million new voters by the fall. Hooks announced that the Jackson family had agreed to let the civil rights organization register potential voters outside the stadiums at their summer concerts. The family had endorsed the program and would serve as the project’s national co-chairpersons. At the same convention, Hooks honored the Jacksons with the NAACP’s H. Claude Hudson Humanitarian Award for their “exemplary unity as a family” and for representing, in Hooks’s words, “an ideal in the struggle for equality by Black Americans.”
Hooks was unambiguous about what was at stake. “If Black Americans lose this election, if they fail to make their votes count at the polls,” he told the more than 3,000 convention delegates, “it will be a long, long four years ahead to 1988. Few years in our history are as important as 1984, when we are literally at a crossroads in our struggle for survival.”
JET magazine covered it. The headline read: “The Jacksons to Help NAACP Voter Campaign.” Vol. 66, No. 20, July 23, 1984, page 8.
Two and a half million people attended the Victory Tour that summer and fall. They passed those booths on the way in.
For a century after slavery ended, Black Americans had the legal right to vote and were systematically prevented from doing so. Poll taxes. Literacy tests designed to fail. Registrars who simply turned people away. Violence against those who persisted. The machinery of exclusion was elaborate, well-funded, and largely legal.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 broke it open. It didn’t just ban discrimination. It required states with a history of suppressing Black votes to obtain federal approval before changing any voting rules. Before. Not after a lawsuit. Not after an election was already lost. Before. The burden of proof was on the states, not on the people they’d spent a century trying to silence. Within a year of the law’s passage, a quarter of a million new Black voters were registered.
By 1984, the man in the White House was Ronald Reagan, and his administration had spent years signaling that enforcing civil rights was not a priority. The law existed. Enforcing it was a choice. Reagan’s Justice Department was making its position clear.
The contradiction is worth sitting with. In the same year the Jacksons partnered with the NAACP to register Black voters, Ronald Reagan invited Michael Jackson to the White House. Not to discuss civil rights. Not to acknowledge the voter registration drive. Reagan wanted “Beat It” for a drunk-driving awareness campaign. He wanted the pop star. He had no use for politics.
Michael Jackson smiled for the photograph. Then he went back on tour and set up voter registration booths outside every stadium.
That was the world the Jacksons walked into on July 4th. The whole family. Michael, yes, but also his brothers, who stood with him as Hooks presented the NAACP’s H. Claude Hudson Humanitarian Award, honoring the Jacksons for representing, in Hooks’s own words, “an ideal in the struggle for equality by Black Americans.” That same night, they lent the Victory Tour’s massive audience to the voter registration drive. The award and the booths were not separate gestures. They happened together, at the same convention, on the same stage, before the same 3,000 delegates.
Note what they did not do: hold a press conference about it, perform their politics for the cameras, or issue a statement crafted by a publicist. Benjamin Hooks announced it. JET magazine recorded it. And then history moved on or was moved along.
This was not a publicity stunt. It was a Black American family, at the height of their power, using that power to serve Black civic life in an election year, under a hostile administration, with the full backing of the country’s oldest civil rights organization.
Nearly a decade later, in 1993, Michael Jackson accepted the NAACP’s Entertainer of the Year award. He said: “There are two things the NAACP stands for that are the most important in my life: freedom and equality.”
The federal oversight created by the Voting Rights Act survived Reagan. It also survived George W. Bush, who reauthorized it in 2006. What finally killed it was the Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Five justices found the oversight formula outdated. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act still exists on paper, but it can’t be enforced. The states that spent a century blocking Black voters no longer need anyone’s permission before changing the rules.
None of this is ancient history. Writer, poll worker, and Georgia activist Anjali Enjeti recent book Ballot is a history of voting in the United States that is also an exposé of a system designed to make it harder for certain people to exercise their most fundamental right. Voter suppression—new ID requirements, purged rolls, closed polling stations, and reduced early voting—is accelerating across the United States. During an interview with Radical Books Collective, Enjeti explains that she had a front-row seat to all of this. She has been gerrymandered out of districts she helped flip blue. Her absentee ballot drop box has been moved 30 minutes away from her home. She has watched Republican-led states enact a cascade of voter-suppression laws with almost no federal oversight. And she is clear-eyed about what this moment demands. “I’ve never felt that elections paved the way to liberation,” she says. “We’ve got strikers. We’ve got protesters. We’ve got people boycotting corporations. Voting is one tool in the toolbox. We need to hold these multiple roles at the same time, and elections are still very important.”
And this week, it got worse. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that has long protected minority communities from redistricting that dilutes their political power. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that Section 2 is now limited to cases of intentional discrimination — a far higher bar. Justice Elena Kagan warned in dissent that the decision allows states to “systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power” without legal consequence. The ruling is expected to have its broadest effect in 2028, when Republicans could move to redraw more than a dozen Democratic-held districts previously shielded by the law.
One day later, the Trump administration confirmed it would use the ruling as a weapon. “Lines are going to change,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, signaling that the Justice Department—once responsible for enforcing the Voting Rights Act to protect minority voters—is preparing to use its weakening to dismantle majority-minority districts nationwide.
The question is who is willing to put their name, platform, and audience in service of that work.
The Jacksons used the then-highest-grossing concert tour in history to register voters. The NAACP stood beside them. Benjamin Hooks said their names out loud and called them an ideal in the struggle for equality by Black Americans.
The Hollywood biopic might have forgotten this.
We don’t have to.
The Lioness Archive
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Sources:
“The Jacksons To Help NAACP Voter Campaign; Convention Hears Three Presidential Hopefuls,” JET, Vol. 66, No. 20, July 23, 1984, p. 8. Johnson Publishing Company.
Radical Books Collective interviewed Anjali Enjeti about voting rights, activism, and the fight for democracy. You can listen to the podcast episode “The Ballot as Battleground: Featuring Anjali Enjeti” here.
Enjeti, Anjali. Ballot. Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. (Object Lessons) is available from Bloomsbury here.