“ That’ s right, dear,” came her mother’ s response.
As the mother and her young child moved on, their exchange seemed to linger behind them. It was the kind of moment that reveals what this 19.3-acre civic and cultural center on the South Side of Chicago can do to turn history from something distant into something up-close and personal.
It is possible that without this visit, this child may never have learned this lesson. With the current political climate, which seeks to erase large swaths of American history, it is uncertain how many little girls will ever know of the long struggle women endured to get the right to vote.
After more than a decade of planning, litigation, and construction, the privately funded $ 850 million campus, which is, in essence a tribute to the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, was opened on Juneteenth— i. e. June 19th— the federal holiday that celebrates the end of American slavery. The centerpiece of the campus is a 225-foot tower of pale stone designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Cut into the upper portion of the tower are words from the 2015 speech Obama gave in Selma, Ala., on the 50th anniversary of the“ Bloody Sunday” attacks on civil rights marchers that resulted in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Spread over eight floors, the building is a museum and presidential library unlike any before it. Its archive is being fully digitized in partnership with the National Archives, the first presidential library to do so. It opened in June under an extreme heat warning, with temperatures pushing 108 degrees. It was Chicago’ s most punishing stretch of heat in years, but the crowds came anyway.
On their arrival to the urban campus, visitors are met with rolling green hills stitched with stone pathways, and long lines of people eagerly taking pictures in front of a larger-than-life statue of Barack and Michelle Obama. Past the checkpoint and ticket booth, the Entry Pavilion sets the sensory register for everything above it. A wall of artificial grass and embossed moss cascades toward the gift shop and café below. A composite map of Chicago hangs on the adjacent wall, colorkeyed by landmarks. Musical instruments float suspended in midair. And at the center of the room, a richly textured painting of Barack and Michelle Obama watches over all of it.
The way up into the building is by escalator, through panels of multicolored stained glass that fracture the view of the campus into abstraction. A digital display wall begins on the second floor and runs to the fifth, streaming cultural moments, public movements, and protests— so that visitors ride upward through a broader American timeline of people demanding change, with the Obamas’ story set inside it rather than before it.
In another section of the second floor, the“ Toward a More Perfect Union” area explores the people, events, and movements that shaped Obama’ s lives and values. It is a repository of campaign memorabilia, civil rights display cases, and the women’ s suffrage exhibit where the little girl asked her piercing question.
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