Los Angeles -- At the height of his stardom, Michael Jackson shot to the top of the charts around the world with the sanguine message, "It don't matter if you're black or white."

In his death, as in his life, the reality has been more grey.

Cultural institutions of Black America -- from Harlem's Apollo Theatre to the Black Entertainment Television (BET) awards in Los Angeles -- witnessed an outpouring of grief since the King of Pop died Thursday.

But for some residents in South-Central Los Angeles, Jackson leaves a deeply complicated legacy -- an African-American who tore down racial barriers with his phenomenal success but also came off as uncomfortable in his own skin.

"Michael Jackson was loved and will be missed around the world. But for black people, the views are mixed because he changed the colour of his skin," said Bill Layne, 61, as he waited for a haircut.

Jackson, the son of a steelworker in the industrial city of Gary, Indiana, started as a child singing sensation with unmistakably African physical features. By the 1990s, his skin was much paler and his nose a different shape.

Jackson said he suffered from vitiligo, a disorder involving a loss of pigmentation. But Jackson faced constant accusations that he bleached his skin, a practice uncommon in the United States but better known in parts of Africa, notably Ghana.

Lawrence Tolliver, who has run a barber-shop in South-Central Los Angeles for four decades, noted that Jackson's two ex-wives were white and said his three children did not appear to have any African blood.

"There's nothing wrong with that -- there are black folks who do different things -- but it's just further proof he didn't like being who he was," Tolliver said as he worked on a customer with an electric razor and barber brush.

"I don't know why; maybe it's tough being famous. But when he saw 'the man in the mirror,' he didn't like who he saw," Tolliver said, referring to the title of one of Jackson's hits.

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