HICAGO, Feb. 19 ? There was the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the early-morning chaos, consoling relatives of the 21 people killed in a nightclub stampede and vowing to help them seek justice in court.
A few hours later, at a West Side police station, there was Mr. Jackson again, praying with the club's owner, Dwain J. Kyles, a man he has known practically since the day Mr. Kyles was born.
This was not their first tragedy together: The night the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Kyles's father, the Rev. Samuel Kyles, had been escorting him to a soul-food dinner at the Kyleses' Memphis home.
Monday morning's nightclub disaster, and the finger-pointing following it, have put Mr. Jackson, this city's most prominent African-American leader, in a strange spot. As always, he is supporting the victims, consulting his old friend Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. about legal options and coordinating funeral arrangements. But he is also supporting Mr. Kyles, who denies the city's contention that the club was operating illegally. And he is trying to explain his own earlier efforts to help the troubled club survive.
Mr. Kyles's South Loop business ? an upscale restaurant, Epitome, and a second-story after-hours hip-hop spot, E2 ? was not just another liquor licensee battling with city officials over building codes. As Chicago's largest black-owned entertainment establishment, it was host to all manner of social and political events for the African-American elite, and was also a magnet for the rowdy younger set.
Nor is Mr. Kyles just another business owner. A leader of civil rights protest when he attended high school in Memphis, he later became a lawyer, worked for Harold Washington, Chicago's only black mayor, and for a Tennessee congressman, Representative Harold E. Ford Sr., and toiled with Mr. Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition on issues like minority contracting.
Mr. Kyles's former wife, with whom he currently lives, is Mr. Jackson's former assistant. Mr. Jackson's son, Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., is among the politicians to whom Mr. Kyles has donated in the past decade. The younger Mr. Jackson issued a statement this week describing Mr. Kyles as "a childhood friend" and "an upstanding example of a young professional person in our community." On Monday morning, it was the elder Mr. Jackson who called Mr. Kyles's father, known as Billy, to tell him of the nightmare at the club.
"They were kind of extended family," explained Frank Watkins, who spent 27 years working for Mr. Jackson and is now Congressman Jackson's press secretary.
"Because the Reverend and Billy Kyles were such good friends, obviously there were welcome arms whenever he came around," Mr. Watkins said of Dwain Kyles. "He was clearly seen as part of the civil rights families, so to speak."
Today, back at his club for the first time since Monday's melee, Mr. Kyles, 48, fell apart, sobbing as he tried to offer condolences before television cameras. Asked on Tuesday when Mr. Kyles might be available for an interview, his lawyer, Andre Grant, said, "Never."
Families of several of the victims have already filed lawsuits against the club, and the city took steps today to revoke all its licenses. In court documents, city lawyers said Epitome and E2 had served alcohol to minors on several occasions, illegally opened during a liquor-license suspension in January and failed to report assaults there.
The city also says the liquor license should be taken away because, it maintains, Calvin Hollins Jr., a convicted felon, is running the club, though Mr. Grant has described Mr. Hollins as just a consultant.
Mara S. Georges, Chicago's corporation counsel, said this afternoon that the city was considering changing its policy so that the police would be notified of court orders like the one that should have barred anyone from entering the second-story nightclub. Ms. Georges also produced transcripts of court proceedings showing that Mr. Kyles was present when the order was described as covering "the mezzanine, the second floor and the V.I.P. rooms." Mr. Grant has said that the court order prohibited use only of the V.I.P. skyboxes above E2's dance floor, not the entire second-floor club.
Mr. Jackson is one of several ministers here who, in response to rowdyism, assaults and shootings at and near the club, tried to help Mr. Kyles get more police protection there last year but who say they did not know about the court order. In a letter to the local alderwoman last April, copies of which were sent to the mayor and the police chief, Mr. Jackson pointed out the elder Mr. Kyles's role in the civil rights movement and in the last hours of Dr. King's life.
"He remains active in the struggle and has obviously passed on this spirit of service to his son," Mr. Jackson wrote. "We consider this facility an asset to our community."
The relationship between the Jacksons and the Kyleses stretches back four decades, to the early days of the civil rights movement, when the elder Mr. Kyles, now 68, headed the Memphis chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Mr. Kyles later opened a Memphis office of Mr. Jackson's organization, then known as Operation PUSH.
On the night of Dr. King's assassination, Mr. Jackson had brought members of a band from Operation Breadbasket here in Chicago to play gospel tunes. Mr. Kyles went to the Lorraine Motel to fetch Dr. King for some home cooking. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Kyles were two of the three people with him when he was shot.
Dwain Kyles, the oldest of four children ? his sister, Dwania, was among 13 first graders to integrate the Memphis schools ? was in junior high at the time of the assassination, and friends say it was a moment of awakening for him. He later refused to play basketball at predominantly white Central High School, suspecting that the coach had recruited him simply because of his race. When he led a civil rights march, without a permit, from Central High to the board of education offices two miles away, his father said, "Right on."
The father, founding pastor of the 800-family Monumental Baptist Church in the South Memphis section, remains a leading figure in Memphis's black community and tours nationally to speak on civil rights. He was a national coordinator of Mr. Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988.
The younger Mr. Kyles has been a prominent figure in Chicago's black business community for decades. He is an active PUSH member as well as a contributor to African-American politicians including former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, State Senators Barack Obama and Emil Jones, and a Cook County commissioner, Bobbie L. Steele. He has prodded the city and the local school board to use more minority contractors and has complained of gentrification's thwarting black businesses.
"He grew up in it ? we call them PUSH babies," said Mary Mitchell, a columnist at The Chicago Sun-Times. "Jackson is an activist, Kyles is an activist, so definitely their paths would cross. He's known Jackson since he was a child, and not just as an icon but as a human being."
In a 1993 profile in The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Mr. Kyles was described as "a dapper revolutionary" who wore dark suits, cuff links and an earring, which he called "a political statement rather than a fashion statement."
"I look out this window, there is not one building that is owned by blacks and Hispanics, and that's inherently problematic," he said then. "I'm committed to the development of the entrepreneurial class in our community."
Bishop Tavis Grant of Sweet Holy Spirit Church, where Mr. Kyles is a member, said he "has not been one of those absent business owners in the African-American community."
"He has helped feed the hungry, he has helped send kids to school, he's helped people get jobs," said Bishop Grant, a friend of Mr. Kyles for 16 years. "He really had high hopes for this venture, and it has all but met its conclusion through this tragedy. He's really broken over this. Who wants to wake up one day and 21 people are dead in your establishment?"
Which is why, after visiting the scene before dawn, touring local hospitals to counsel families and helping identify victims at the morgue, Mr. Jackson went to the Area 4 detective bureau. Mr. Kyles was being interrogated there, and Mr. Jackson wanted to make sure that the son of his old friend had a lawyer, and a hand to hold in prayer.
"I know Dwain, I know some of the people who perished, we know all the people that are involved ? this is in the heart of our community," Mr. Jackson said. "If one of my sons who is in politics and business were caught in a catastrophe of this kind. . . ."
"I'm a minister," he finally added. "And there is pain."