From the Chicago Defender’s early call for Black Southerners to come north, to the political rise that began in Illinois and culminated in Barack Obama, the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side is presented as both a tribute to a city’s history and a te
In 1910, Black residents made up about 2% of the population of Chicago. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of African Americans still lived in the South, where slavery ended in 1865 and freedom arrived in a brutally limited form—under Jim Crow, with brutal peonage and everyday restrictions.
They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t go to school with whites. They couldn’t shop in most stores. Many couldn’t hold many jobs. For the country, parts of that history were later scrubbed from the American narrative. For those who lived it, leaving the South was one of the few options that existed.
They could leave—just get on a train and go north. The Chicago Defender, an influential Black newspaper, pushed that idea hard, holding its “Great Northern Drive” in 1917. It urged Southern Blacks to quit the land that oppressed them and come to Chicago, where there was work and dignity.
Reception, though, was often chilly. A Chicago Tribune editorial carried a headline that read, “BLACK MAN, STAY SOUTH!” calling the migration “a huge mistake” and claiming “the Negro is happiest when the white race asserts its superiority.”
Still, over the next half century, half a million Blacks came to Chicago. In 1970, they made up a third of the city’s population. The story became familiar enough that it can slip past attention—until you look at who arrived and what happened next. List some of the most famous people to come out of Chicago in the past 60 years—Muhammad Ali, Rev. Jesse Jackson. Oprah Winfrey. Michael Jordan—and a pattern appears: Black Americans who came from somewhere else arrived. made the best of the opportunities they found. and prospered.
Barack Obama’s arrival, too, is framed here as no accident—groundwork laid long before his presidential run. Illinois elected its first Black senator, Carol Moseley Braun, in 1992. New York has yet to elect one, and the first Black senator from California is noted as Kamala Harris.
Obama, now the nation’s 44th president, has planted his presidential center on the South Side, where Michelle Obama was born and raised and where he “cut his political eye teeth.”
The center itself is already drawing its own reaction. The central tower—once an object of derision. called “forbidding” and a “Klingon prison” by early critics—appears dramatic as it rises behind the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry when traveling south on Stony Island. When the light hits it, the grey stone is tinted with the lightest pink.
What the new center will mean for the city, and for the nation, is laid out through three audiences.
For people outside Chicago, it is positioned as a tourist attraction. It’s not expected to be enormous. If the Obama Center reaches the hopeful target of a million annual visitors. that would be roughly eight million fewer than Navy Pier gets. Nationwide. though. the pull could extend further—millions of people who voted for Obama. who watched their faith in the country and its possibilities surge during his two administrations. and who would want to visit and be immersed in both his story and the First Lady’s story as the central museum tells it.
For Chicago residents, the expectation is more mixed. Many will want to see it once out of curiosity and a vague sense of obligation—the way people sometimes feel compelled to visit the Illinois Holocaust Museum.
Schoolchildren, however, are described as a different category entirely: they’ll be herded through by the busload, with the museum designed to handle their throngs.
The center also comes with a social action component that goes beyond a place to stand and look. It includes classrooms, meeting rooms, and recording facilities. The description here is that community groups will use the space, and Chicagoans will also come for green space and a playground.
The museum itself is intended as a push toward involvement. There is a letter on display from a 6-year-old New York boy named Alex. His reaction comes after he reads a news story about a Syrian boy hurt in an air strike. In the letter to Obama. Alex tells the president that if the boy needs a home. his family will step up.
“Park in the driveway or on the street,” Alex writes. “We’ll be waiting for you guys with flags, flowers and balloons. We will give him family and he will be our brother. Catherine my little sister will be collecting butterflies and fireflies for him. I have a friend from Syria, Omar, and I will introduce him to Omar and we can all play together… Since he won’t bring toys and doesn’t have toys Catherine will share her big blue stripy white bunny. And I will share my bike and I will teach him how to ride it.”.
The letter lands with a question that doesn’t feel abstract. The piece argues that maybe a kind of innocent kindness has been killed in the country. and that exhibits like this might draw only sneers from jaded eyes. Or maybe—just as plausibly—some visitors will be moved. inspired. and determined to be the best sort of people they can be.
If that second possibility holds, the Obama Presidential Center is portrayed as a place that could improve lives in Chicago and across the country, at a moment when the country is still described as needing help.
Obama Presidential Center Chicago South Side Barack Obama Michelle Obama Chicago Defender Great Northern Drive Carol Moseley Braun Kamala Harris migration museum