Front Row to History: The Opening of the Obama Presidential Center

Eemaan Khan, MPP Class of 2027, writes about attending the opening of the Obama Presidential Center.

I found out the Obama Presidential Center was opening through a Harris newsletter sitting in my inbox. There was a link to an exclusive events webpage for the opening events, and I signed up before I'd even finished reading the email.

It's a short walk from campus, and I'll admit I wasn't prepared for how the building hits you when you approach it. It's an imposing, off-rectangular tower clad in gray granite, with words that appear to be cut straight into the stone near the top. I stood at the corner of Stony Island and 60th for a few minutes just looking up at it before I went inside.

Once in, I caught a panel called "The Promise and Practice of Democracy in a Global World," moderated by Ben Rhodes, the former Deputy National Security Advisor who now co-hosts Pod Save the World. He was joined by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Tessza Udvarhelyi, a deputy mayor in Budapest and Obama Scholar, and Nerima Wako, who runs Siasa Place, an organization that's mobilized millions of young Kenyans into civic life. I'd been reading Friedman's columns for years, and there was something surreal about sitting feet away from him as he debated what it actually takes to keep a democracy functioning when no two countries are under the same pressures.

What got me more than the panel, though, was just looking around the room. Elected officials, Chicago and Illinois leaders, Black community leaders from across the South Side, all in the same audience, all clearly aware they were watching something that doesn't happen twice: a presidential center opening for the first time on the South Side. The Center itself is built less like a museum and more like a place people are meant to actually use; a 19.3-acre campus with a four-floor museum, a fully digital presidential library, a Chicago Public Library branch with its own reading rooms, a recording studio, athletic facilities & events space, and gardens that already had people walking through them that morning.

Being there, on a campus I now call home, for a moment like that was incredible. It's also a pretty good reminder of why being at Harris—and in Chicago—puts you in the center of the action. By the time I left, the DJ outside had the crowd going, with dancers leading a few hundred people in a call-and-response that summed up the day better than any panel could.