A Voice of the Past, or Still a Contender?

He was . . . somebody, still is . . . somebody.

But how much less of a somebody is the theme of a “Frontline” documentary that notes the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s epic achievements through the late 1980s while ultimately depicting him as an almost tragic figure who kicked down racial and political doors he may never pass through. Someone who seems unaware today that his moment in history may have passed.

“Many regard him as an anachronism,” observes Marshall Frady, the admiring yet fair-minded narrator-correspondent for Tuesday’s “The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson,” which is drawn from the former ABC News reporter’s soon-to-be-published biography, “Jesse: His Life and Pilgrimage.” Mark Zwonitzer is the producer.

Jackson is the Energizer Bunny that keeps on going and going and going--the great unknowns being his ultimate destination and when he will stop. Not yet, apparently.

Yet this PBS documentary arrives when the 54-year-old reverend has been eclipsed in the United States by Colin Powell as the African American most likely to reach the White House and by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as the African American most thought about by whites and most feared and disliked by the nation’s Jews.

It was Powell, not Jackson, who coyly excited the nation and its media this political season until publicly declining to enter the presidential race, which polls gave him a great shot at winning. It was Farrakhan, not Jackson, who created last October’s televised Washington march that earned global attention by enlisting hundreds of thousands of black men in the cause of empowerment and solidarity. And it was Farrakhan, not Jackson, whom “60 Minutes” courted after a controversial foreign tour, granting him an audience of many millions in a recent double-sized lead interview with Mike Wallace that affirmed the passionate sizzle of the African American leader’s defoliating rhetoric.

Then there is Jackson . . . who forged passages across which that other guy, the more conservative Powell, may ultimately stride.

Jackson . . . who sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 and 1988 with stunning results for an African American, as “Pilgrimage” notes--the latter effort earning him more than 1,200 delegates, enough for second place behind eventual nominee Michael Dukakis.

Jackson . . . riding high back then.

And now. . . .

After the flop of his ill-timed protest against the near-exclusion of blacks from this year’s Academy Awards nominees, he continues urging Hollywood executives to create more opportunities for African Americans and other minorities. A significant issue, yet seemingly not cosmic enough to return Jackson to center stage.

“His risk of devolving into triviality . . . has dismayed many of his oldest and fondest supporters,” Frady writes in a current New Yorker article about Jackson and his wife of 33 years, Jackie. The article is more compelling than the largely formulaic, clips-and-talking heads “Frontline” documentary that it overlaps.

Jackie Jackson is prominent in “Pilgrimage,” too, and the 90-minute program does connect its anecdotal interviews and archival footage in ways that capture the rhythms of her husband’s life and times.

That includes persistent rumors of extramarital “romantic buccaneering” by him, and one wonders how aggressively the media would have probed Jackson’s private life had he been the Democratic nominee in 1988 instead of Dukakis. He was already buckling under one public relations debacle, his “hymietown” reference to New York that today seems almost quaint compared with the flaming anti-Jewishness that sometimes spews from Farrakhan.

Jackson has spent more than three decades in the public eye. From his fatherless upbringing in the segregated South to his college sit-ins and swift rise in the civil rights movement as a zealous disciple of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., with whom he had many disagreements, Jackson is no creature of television. But his celebrity is.

His personal magnetism has always shone through the lens. You experience it throughout the “Frontline” documentary, even in scratchy footage of him as a 21-year-old college student, failing to talk his way past a white goon blocking entry to a segregated restaurant in Greensboro, N.C., his superior smile hinting that he had achieved what he wanted by getting this racist folly recorded on camera.

Frady appears not to miss any seminal moments in Jackson’s evolution as a civil rights leader and international figure, from his stewardship of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago to King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Jackson had been standing 10 feet below King in the motel’s courtyard when the shot was fired, Frady says, and 14 hours later he was speaking about the murder on NBC’s “Today” program.

“It was as if he could see his destiny opening up before him at last, and he rushed toward it,” Frady says.

Too fast to suit other King aides. Long resentful of Jackson, they saw his behavior as “brazen opportunism,” Frady adds, and were “furious that he had so dramatically inflated his own part in the story of King’s final moments.”

Ultimately, notes an old comrade, Calvin Morris, Jackson’s persona “zoomed into the stratosphere” and he became a “celebrity among celebrities,” to the extent that “in Jesse’s own mind, the movement and his person became one. And I don’t believe that.”

Whatever Jackson himself now believes, you won’t hear it from this documentary, which covers his post-1988 period in a blurring whoosh, and in doing so stresses his apparent decline in the public’s eye.

A panoramic sheen of black greeted the speakers at Farrakhan’s Washington march. Only five months earlier, Jackson had organized a 30-mile march in Georgia to dramatize the nation’s economic and racial chasms, a three-day affair that, Frady reports, Jackson expected would attract a rainbow of participants in the thousands, but in fact drew only several hundred. Yet Jackson “no longer seemed to notice how few people were with him,” Frady says. “He just kept on going.”

* “The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson” airs on “Frontline” at 9 p.m. Tuesday on KCET-TV Channel 28.