Dispatch from Chicago: The Obama Presidential Center Opening

What better time than now for the soon-to-open Obama Center to remind Americans that we can create change from the bottom up?

“I often say democracy is not self-executing. It depends on us as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up for certain core values, because otherwise we may not have them.” President Barack Obama at the Jefferson Educational Society, Sept. 16, 2025

In June, the long-anticipated Obama Presidential Center will open on a 19.3-acre campus in Chicago’s historic Jackson Park, once the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

Construction continued on the Obama Presidential Center this month. (Grantlin Banks for The Contrarian)

The center is nestled next to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (just named one of the world’s top museums) and is expected to draw at least 700,000 visitors annually to the predominantly Black South Side of the city. TV viewers may have seen the recent building walk-through and interview with President Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert on May 5 or the commercial advertising the center’s June 19 — Juneteenth — opening.

Because I live just blocks away, I’ve seen workers put the finishing touches on the campus: planting flowers and trees, smoothing freshly laid sidewalks, installing bike racks and signage. The city expects tourism to the $850 million campus — there’s also an auditorium and public event space, a Chicago Public Library branch, an athletic building, gardens, and other amenities — to jumpstart an economic windfall of at least $3 billion and spur thousands of jobs.

Chicagoans hope the anticipated economic and cultural gains materialize. But there’s another takeaway we ought to pay attention to, as the former president noted in his interview with Colbert:

“What I really want people to take away from this [museum] is that they are the force behind change and every positive thing that’s happened in the country,” Obama told Colbert. “They are what lifted me up to the presidency. They’re the folks that ultimately bring about changes to make this a fairer, better country. I want them to be fired up to go back to their communities and make things better there too.” (NOTE: this quote is in the Youtube clip I linked above.)

Watching that clip, I couldn’t help but think how relevant those words are these days, as the news brings a steady stream of attacks on American ideals through unhinged lies, blatant corruption (the latest: a $1.7 billion fund using taxpayer money to pay his cronies who were supposedly targeted by a “weaponized” Justice Department, including convicted Jan. 6 rioters) gross incompetence, and worse from Donald Trump and his regime.

Obama’s remarks made no reference to Trump; the former president rarely refers to Trump. The Obama Foundation is a nonprofit and does not engage in political activity. Its website states that it is committed to “educating and supporting a democracy that is inclusive of different viewpoints and lived experiences.”

A statue of Barack and Michelle Obama was unveiled at the center. (Lorraine Forte for The Contrarian)

Civic knowledge as a mission

The foundation’s programming for the center includes civics and democracy education, a leadership initiative for people in the public and private sectors and civil society, a scholars program for young people, and public conversations and speaker events.

“Our job would not be done to simply tell the history of President Obama’s time in office and even the people on whose shoulders he stood,” Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said in a February episode of “The Tea with April Ryan, “but to empower and inspire and connect people to learn from what they experience at our campus and bring change home to their communities.”

The Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock incorporates civic engagement and democracy into its mission, but exploring the promise of democracy in depth “is a very different way of telling the [Obama] story,” Jodi Kanter, author of “Presidential Libraries as Performance,” explained to me.

“It’s saying, ‘Let’s not start with us [Barack and Michelle Obama], let’s start with the story that made it possible,’ ” Kanter said.

Dick Simpson, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the Obama Center programming aligns with a broader, long-term movement to reinvigorate civics education in schools and universities. Federal legislation aimed at accomplishing that never gained serious traction, even before the Trump era.

But now, the opening of the Obama Center creates “an opportunity to push that agenda more broadly,” Simpson, the author of “Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago,” added.

What better time to push that agenda than 2026, when America celebrates its 250th birthday?

Lorraine Forte is a Chicago journalist and former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times editorial page. She does not use AI in her work.

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