people... he is someone who brings people together rather than divides people,” Kaloustian said.
Joan Kaloustian, a Chicago resident of many decades, said,“ I’ m sure there’ s going to be a debate going on for years before the whole city eventually falls in love with it.” And then she said something that the building’ s critics tend to miss:“ It’ s for everybody. We just walked through the playground. It’ s adorable.”
Photos courtesy of The Obama Foundation
And then there is Leah Jordan, twenty-two, who came through the museum and left changed. She was too young to fully register the Obama years as they happened. The exhibits let her assemble them.“ Just getting to piece those pieces together, it was very inspiring and left me leaving here wanting to do more,” she says. Asked what young people everywhere should take from this place, she reaches for the message Obama famously kept close:“ Hard things are hard. Just remember, and don’ t give up the fight.”
The Long Way Home
At the dedication on June 18, the day before the doors opened to the public on the Juneteenth holiday, Barack Obama stood at John Lewis Plaza, a short walk from the University of Chicago lecture halls where he once taught, the diner that still serves his breakfast, the barbershop that kept his chair, and told the crowd that the Center“ reminds us of what we can be.” Michelle Obama, in a tribute that left her husband wiping his eyes, poignantly said,“ Hope is all we have.” Barack Obama left the South Side for the U. S. Senate, then the White House, then the world. Now his legacy is etched into the tower that people in his old neighborhood can read from their stoops:“ You Are America.”
Osaretin Iyare is Deputy Editor of the Morgan Global Journalism Review and Research Director at Morgan State University’ s Center for New Media & Strategic Initiatives, where he helps shape research and multimedia storytelling initiatives. Before joining Morgan State, he spent several years as a television journalist in Nigeria, serving as presenter of the network’ s daily primetime news program, Democracy Today. n
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