Obama Presidential Center Opens in Chicago With a Plea for Democracy

Barack Obama walked onto a stage in Jackson Park on Thursday and greeted the crowd the only way a man who learned politics a few miles north could. Hello Chicago. Sweet home, Chicago.

The line capped a long, celebrity-thick dedication for the Obama Presidential Center, the 19.3-acre campus on the city's South Side that opened to the public the next morning, on Juneteenth. What could have been a tidy ribbon-cutting turned into something closer to a civics sermon, delivered without once naming the current occupant of the White House.

"And yet more than anything, I hope this center will serve as an affirmation of just how special, how precious, our democracy truly is, and remind us what we can achieve when we embrace our shared responsibilities as citizens."

Barack Obama, at the Obama Presidential Center dedication

Michelle Obama spoke before him, and her remarks did what his own could not. She praised her husband's "unshakeable moral fiber", and the cameras caught the former president wiping his eyes.

The guest list read like a Democratic-era yearbook spliced with a music festival. Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, The Roots, and Bono and the Edge performed; Christina Aguilera, Common, Eddie Vedder and Marc Anthony joined them. Steven Spielberg, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel sat in the audience. Foundation chief executive Valerie Jarrett and board chair Marty Nesbitt took the microphone too. The performances were no surprise; the Foundation had rolled out the lineup days earlier.

The building itself is the argument. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the campus is not a traditional presidential library. The National Archives never took custody of Obama's records, which remain digital. What rises in Jackson Park instead is a museum and a community campus, a wager that a presidency is better honored by a place that gathers people than by a climate-controlled vault of paper.

That choice cost years of friction with neighbors who feared what a tourist magnet would do to a historic public park, and to the rents around it. The Foundation has pointed to job training and the pull of visitors toward the South Side. The worry about who gets priced off the blocks nearby did not vanish because a stage went up.

Obama used much of his time, pointedly and without partisan names, on what he called American values, urging the crowd against cynicism and despair. The setting did the rest of the talking. A Black family's path from the South Side to the White House, told in a museum a short walk from where it began.

By Friday morning the doors were open to anyone holding a timed ticket, the velvet rope traded for schoolchildren and South Side regulars filing through galleries that trace one improbable career. Stripped of the celebrity wattage, the pitch was that the place belongs less to Obama than to the people who will use it. The deeds, as always, get argued on the blocks outside.