Presidential libraries not only preserve the documents and official records of America’s commanders-in-chief, but also reflect the policies and narratives of their administrations. On June 19, during the Juneteenth holiday, history will be made on the South Side with the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, honoring the country’s first Black president.
The 19.3-acre campus will boast an array of public spaces that include a museum, an athletic center, a garden, a public plaza, a playground and a library. Designed to inspire and connect communities, the center is much more than a presidential monument. It’s a testament to the power of the grassroots political movement that helped elect Obama, as well as the South Side community that nurtured him and his family.
“With a library and a foundation on the South Side of Chicago, not only will we be able to encourage and effect change locally, but what we can also do is to attract the world to Chicago,” Obama said in May 2015, when along with then-first lady Michelle Obama, he announced that the South Side had been chosen to house the future center. “I’m thrilled to be able to put this resource in the heart of the neighborhood that means the world to me,” the first lady added. “Every value, every memory, every important relationship to me exists in Chicago. I consider myself a South Sider.”
Before the presidency and the world’s attention, the Obamas’ story began in the same community that houses the new presidential center.
Starting on the South Side
From community organizing in Roseland to working at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park to living in Kenwood, the various communities of the South Side have been an important foundation for the president and Michelle Obama. The first lady grew up in South Shore, which borders the city’s southern shoreline along Lake Michigan. Learning to read at age four, Michelle Obama also played the piano and joined a gifted program in sixth grade. After graduating from Whitney Young High School in 1981, she enrolled at Princeton, where she graduated with a major in sociology before earning her law degree from Harvard.
Before finishing law school (also at Harvard, but at a different time), Barack Obama worked as the executive director of the Developing Communities Project, a non-profit organization in Roseland. With a mission to use community organizing to improve the quality of life in Roseland and nearby communities, the future president helped establish a tenants’ rights organization, a job training program and a college prep tutoring program — experiences he would later label “the best education I ever had.”
After meeting at Chicago’s Sidley & Austin law firm, where Michelle Robinson (as the future first lady was known then) worked and Obama interned, the two began dating. Their courtship took them to many South Side locations including, the Baskin-Robbins’ Hyde Park location where they first kissed in 1989, and to church basements, where Robinson witnessed Obama’s charisma and debating skills during community meetings. After a few years of courtship, they married in 1992 at Trinity United Church of Christ on the far South Side.
A Strong Political Debut
While teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, Barack Obama became the director of Illinois Project Vote!, a grassroots organization dedicated to increasing minority voter turnout during the election season. Within a few months, Obama recruited staff and volunteers and helped train 700 deputy registrars. His community organizing skills helped register more than 150,000 Black voters citywide before the Illinois and national elections held in November 1992, which scored the presidency for Bill Clinton and a U.S. Senate seat for Carol Moseley Braun, the nation’s first Black woman to win the post. The massive voter turnout marked Barack Obama’s official debut as a rising local political star, and in 1996, he won his first political race for the Illinois State Senate’s 13th District, which features a big swath of the South Side (including Hyde Park, Kenwood, South Shore and Woodlawn). He was re-elected to a four-year term in 1998 and won a third term in 2002.
As a state senator, he helped pass major bipartisan legislation that focused on criminal justice, ethics reform and healthcare. He was also instrumental in the passage of the state’s first law requiring homicide interrogations to be taped, co-sponsoring a law that improved tax credits for the working poor and serving as the point person for the Gift Ban Act, which prohibits politicians from using campaign funds for personal use. During his state senate tenure, Obama also served as the Democratic spokesperson for the Public Health and Welfare Committee, co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules and a member of the Judiciary and Revenue Committees.
Michelle Obama was also active during this time, working at the University of Chicago and helping establish the University Community Service Center, which helps students connect with Chicago’s diverse communities, particularly on the South Side. After the Obamas’ daughters, Sasha and Malia, were born, she was appointed executive director of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, later becoming its vice president for community and external affairs. By 2004, the Obamas had put down deeper roots on the South Side, having purchased an eight-bedroom mansion in the Kenwood community, just north of Hyde Park. At the same time, Barack Obama’s political ambitions were moving from Illinois to the national stage.
A Speech & a Presidential Campaign
On July 27, 2004, Obama, who months earlier had announced his candidacy for Illinois’ junior U.S. Senate seat, gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Although not widely known outside of the Land of Lincoln, he had been chosen from a short list of rising stars within the Democratic Party.
Not long after stepping onto the stage against the backdrop of the civil rights-era classic, “Keep on Pushing,” by Chicago’s own Impressions, Obama shared the story of his multicultural background and commitment to social change, declaring that, “[t]onight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” After walking off the stage with Michelle Obama, he was no longer an unknown from Illinois but a national political superstar with a future shot at America’s highest office.
Less than four months after his Boston speech, Obama was elected to Moseley Braun’s former seat in the U.S. Senate. A few years later, on Feb. 17, 2007, he stood with his family on the steps of the Old Illinois State Capitol in Springfield — the same steps where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech in 1858 — and declared his candidacy for president. Channeling his Chicago political past, Obama rallied grassroots support from volunteers and donors across the country, adopting the now-famous slogan “Yes We Can” for his campaign. More than a year later, on Nov. 4, 2008, Obama was elected as the country’s first Black president.
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama famously said to a crowd of more than 120,000 in Grant Park, where he was flanked by Michelle Obama and their daughters. “It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.”
Life After the Presidency
Since leaving office in 2017, President Obama and the first lady have remained busy. The two — who have authored three best-selling books apiece — have a production company, Higher Ground, that has produced various documentaries and specials for Netflix. Michelle Obama also hosts a podcast with her brother, Craig Robinson, called “IMO (In My Opinion),” which shares conversations, lessons and life challenges from their upbringing. The Obamas have further focused on philanthropy through the Obama Foundation, established in 2014, which supports civic engagement, leadership development and the construction of the Obama Presidential Center.
“The Obama Presidential Center is the embodiment of the mission that the Obamas have followed through their public life — that ordinary people can do extraordinary things and make the world a better place,” Michael Strautmanis, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer for the Obama Foundation, told Air Chicago.
Stretching along Stony Island Avenue between 60th and 63rd Streets in Woodlawn, the museum features four floors that document Obama’s story. The museum’s highlight is an immersive replica of the Obama Oval Office, complete with common items found there, including a wooden bowl of apples on a coffee table. The Sky Room, located in the museum building, offers panoramic views of Chicago. The newest branch of the Chicago Public Library will open at the center, featuring interactive digital media spaces and a reading room. Another focal point of the center is the Forum, a community space that includes the Democracy In Action Lab, a recording studio, the Elie Wiesel Auditorium and the Hadiya Pendleton Atrium. A gift shop, grab-and-go cafe and restaurant complete the amenities.
The 60,000-square-foot Home Court athletic and event space is designed to promote health, mentorship and leadership skills. Outdoor areas include the Great Lawn, a 58,000-square-foot green space for summer gatherings and winter sledding; the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit & Vegetable Garden and Teaching Kitchen (for learning about growing, harvesting and preparing fruits and vegetables); and the John Lewis Plaza. The campus’s additional amenities feature a playground, a water terrace, a women’s garden and courtyards. “The center had to be accessible and a place for creativity to happen and the community to gather,” said Strautmanis.
Art and Connection
Perhaps one of the most striking features of the Obama Presidential Center is the presence of commissioned artwork throughout every space. Of the 16 official presidential libraries, only one includes a site-specific commission, which is a mural created in 1961 for the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri.
There are 28 commissioned art installations displayed across the campus from a diverse range of artists and disciplines. Large-scale pieces for the center were designed by 30 artists from across the country. Some of the artists contributing work boast a global reputation, like Ethiopian-born painter Julie Mehretu, who created “Uprising of the Sun,” a massive glass installation on the museum’s north side. Among emerging artists showcasing at the center, Lindsay Adams, a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, designed the color-splashed, mixed-media work, “Weary Blues,” for the cafe. Other contributors, like painter and muralist Dorian Sylvain, enjoy such a widespread community art presence that their work is instantly recognized throughout Chicago.
A South Side native, Sylvain has painted murals in South Shore, Bronzeville, Hyde Park, Chatham and Kenwood. She often uses colors and textures to highlight cultures and history, and was excited to have the chance to create a piece that reflects the center’s surrounding area. “It feels affirming for an artist who grew up on the South Side during the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, witnessing Black people pushing for liberation with the Black Arts Movement, Operation Breadbasket with Jesse Jackson and watching Jesse run for president — then seeing Obama elected twice,” Sylvain told Air Chicago. “To have this cultural institution right here on the South Side, by the first Black president, stands as a monument to Black excellence.”
Sylvain and multidisciplinary Chicago artist Sam Kirk collaborated on “Pass It Forward,” an evocative, two-story mural featuring basketball players and women playing double dutch, set against cultural patterns and shapes. “The title is a play on basketball lingo, but I see it as part of my practice of mentorship and creating opportunities for emerging artists,” said Sylvain. “How do we create the next generation of culture keepers if we don’t pass it forward?”
Hope, change and service — themes that President Barack Obama promoted throughout his social activism and political career are the tenets underpinning the Obama Presidential Center. With a large campus to engage visitors of all ages and backgrounds, there’s no question that the center is truly passing it forward.
Obama Presidential Center – 6001 S. Stony Island Ave.
Obama Presidential Center
Credit: Angie McMonigal
Iconic Chicago Sculptor Richard Hunt
Credit: Lawrence Agyei for Obama Foundation
Uprising of the Sun by Julie Mehretu
Credit: The Obama Foundation
President Obama tours the Obama Presidential Center
Credit: The Obama Foundation
President Obama tours the Obama Presidential Center
Credit: The Obama Foundation
Obama Presidential Center
Credit: The Obama Foundation
President Obama tours the Obama Presidential Center
Credit: The Obama Foundation
