Obama's new Presidential Center and his tricky relationship with the South Side

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After nearly 10 years of planning and construction, the Obama Presidential Center is opening on the South Side of Chicago — right across the street from an under-resourced high school, in a segregated neighborhood where home prices have jumped. Who is the Center for, and what will it mean for the people who live there? We get into it with two South Siders who've covered the Center for years — journalist Natalie Moore and the Invisible Institute's Maira Khwaja — about the Chi's tricky relationship with the president who claims them.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's good, y'all?
0:01.9	You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.
0:05.2	I'm Gene Demby.
0:06.2	And I'm B.A. Parker.
0:08.2	Okay, so there's this school on the south side of Chicago called Hyde Park Academy.
0:13.0	It's really big and it has a lot of the challenges that really big inner city schools
0:17.4	with lots of poor kids have.
0:19.0	You know, old building, not a lot of resources.
0:21.4	You've heard that story before, yeah.
0:23.6	Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:24.8	Just last month, some students there walked out of class to protest because three students
0:29.0	died over the course of just one month.
0:31.3	That's horrible.
0:32.9	But the students who walked out said that the school had cut the community groups
0:36.4	offering support services.
0:39.1	But right across the street, Stoney Island Avenue, from High Park Academy, is the sprawling, ambitiously designed campus of the Obama Presidential Center.
0:51.0	Not the presidential library, even though that's still what some folks call it. Right, right, right. But there is actually a Chicago public library branch on the center of campus grounds. But anyway, it has a big basketball court. There are grills for everybody to use. This is a state-of-the-art playground in a museum. Parker, this is a sledding hill. A sledding hill? Yeah, because, you know, Chicago is famously flat. And so Michelle Obama, you know, who grew up nearby on the south side, had them built one because she never got to slay it as a kid. Oh. The Obama Center reportedly cost around $850 million to build, and the Obama Foundation tells the fact that it was almost all private money that was raised to pay for this thing.
1:28.3	But you know how it goes.
1:29.1	The city, of course, had to come up off some money for costs related to its construction in a public park there.
1:36.2	So the Obama Center is set to officially open to the public on Juneteenth.
1:40.7	But from almost the moment around 10 years ago, they announced it back in 2017, that this pretty spot sitting on Lake Michigan would be the spot for the Obama Center.
1:51.3	There has been pushback, like a lot of it and from a lot of different directions.
	...

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