3 Former Presidents Join Obama Presidential Center Dedication

Former President Barack Obama returned to Chicago’s South Side on Thursday to dedicate his presidential center, telling a crowd of thousands that the campus “could not be any place else.”

Obama, who recalled first arriving in the city in 1985 to organize churches in the community battered by steel-plant closings, calling the site not a monument to himself, but “an expression of thanks” to the people who shaped him. He said its exhibits open not with his own story but with the story of the United States of America, and focus on the ordinary citizens and shared values he believes make democracy possible.

“If you come for a day and you don’t have time to see everything, I would urge you to skip the clips of my speeches,” Obama said. “You have heard them all before.” Instead, he pointed visitors toward “the stories of those ordinary citizens who helped make that change happen.”

The dedication ceremony kicked off on Thursday morning at the 19-acre campus’s John Lewis Plaza with a host of performances as well as speeches by Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama.

Performers included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Christina Aguilera, U2’s Bono and The Edge, The Roots, Common, Eddie Vedder, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Marc Anthony, and more. The Obama Presidential Center officially opens to the public on Friday, June 19—coinciding with the Juneteenth holiday.

Former Presidents Joe Biden (D), George W. Bush (R), and Bill Clinton (D) were also among the guests, along with former first ladies Jill Biden, Laura Bush, and Hillary Clinton. Also in attendance were former Vice President Kamala Harris, along with other elected officials and foreign dignitaries such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were not among the guests. Trump has frequently criticized his predecessor, including in a Truth Social post this week featuring an AI-generated image of the center with a trash bag placed on top and a message saying the “Obama Library ten years from now will be a ‘Mecca’ for those who hate America!”

‘To Remind Us of Who We Can Be’

President Obama said the center was built to look forward, not to dwell on his time in office—sharing a familiar message of ‘hope’ that was once a main slogan of his presidential campaigns.

“The exhibits in the center are not meant to evoke nostalgia for some gauzy, bygone era, some unattainable past that we can dream about and say, ‘oh, we miss you, Barack,'” he said. “They’re meant to remind us of who we can be. To remind us of what’s possible. So we can forge ahead, clear-eyed and confident, and do the work that still needs to be done.”

Michelle Obama described the center as an extension of the values of her husband’s presidency. She called it “a beacon of hope, a monument to our unshakable values,” naming equality, empathy, honesty, inclusion and fairness, and said those values belong to ordinary Americans, not to her husband alone.

She told the crowd that the center “is grounded in our stories, but it has never been about us,” and said it would stand “long after we’re gone.”

President Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, but the South Side of Chicago later became home for the Obamas. He met his wife, then-Michelle Robinson, while they both worked at a law firm. They married in 1992.

Michelle Obama grew up on Chicago’s South Side, and the couple raised their two daughters in the area before Obama’s election and moving to the White House in 2009.

Touring the finished presidential center for the first time last week, she said she hoped it would change the trajectory of “the people—especially the young people—who grew up in this community that I call home.”

The center is not a traditional presidential library. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) oversees a system of 16 presidential libraries, federal facilities that house presidents’ records and artifacts, but the Obama Foundation owns and operates this campus, and the administration’s records are largely digital.

The foundation says about 95 percent were born-digital, with no paper version, and that the NARA-run Obama Presidential Library will be the first to be fully digital. There is no NARA research facility on the Chicago campus. A Chicago Public Library branch operates there, separate from the presidential archives.

Inside, the ticketed museum fills four floors of a 225-foot tower and moves visitors through the nation’s founding, the civil rights and labor movements, Obama’s 2008 campaign, and his two terms as the first black U.S. president.

Elected in 2008, Obama served from 2009 to 2017. Prior to that, he was a U.S. senator from Illinois and a state senator. Exhibits include the couple’s wedding invitation, 440 campaign buttons from 2008, and a full-scale replica of the Oval Office, where visitors can sit behind a replica of the Resolute Desk.

The tower itself displays the words of the former president. A sculptural screen near its top spells out in 5-foot-tall letters a part of Obama’s 2015 speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches. Titled “You Are America,” the passage centers on the idea that the most powerful word in American democracy is “We,” according to the foundation. The letters wrap the Sky Room, a free public space atop the museum with panoramic views of the South Side of Chicago and Lake Michigan.

The campus also includes a public forum, the library branch, an NBA-regulation basketball facility called Home Court, a playground, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden, which the foundation says builds on the White House Kitchen Garden that Michelle Obama planted as part of her Let’s Move! Initiative as first lady.

The center is located in Jackson Park, near where Obama began his political career as a community organizer. The foundation projects it will welcome 750,000 to 1 million visitors a year, and museum tickets were sold out through the opening weekend.

Museum admission is $30 for adults, $23 for children ages 3 to 11, and free for children 2 and younger, with reduced rates for Illinois residents who show proof of residency, the foundation says.

Most of the campus is free to the public. The foundation says museum admission is also free to Illinois residents on Tuesdays, to military personnel and their immediate families from Armed Forces Day through Labor Day under the Blue Star Museums program, and to people receiving food assistance through the Museums for All program.