Speaker
Gene Demby
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
The Obama Presidential Center reportedly cost around $850 million to build, funded almost entirely through private fundraising by the Obama Foundation.
Three students at Hyde Park Academy died within a single month, prompting a student walkout to protest cuts to community support services.
The Obama Presidential Center was set to officially open to the public on Juneteenth, a symbolically loaded choice given the center's location in a historically Black neighborhood.
The Obama Presidential Center opened on Chicago's South Side as a $850 million monument to hope — but right across the street, Hyde Park Academy students are walking out over the deaths of classmates and cuts to support services. The juxtaposition captures everything complicated about the center's arrival.
Friends who previewed the Obama Center cried — it felt like the promise of 2015. Opening in 2026, when Democratic voters are furious at both parties and the Obama-era hope feels distant, the center arrives as a time capsule to a different emotional reality. The museum never says Trump's name. It doesn't have to.
Calling what's happening in Woodlawn 'gentrification' is technically imprecise: classic gentrification — wealthy white newcomers flooding a Black neighborhood — often doesn't happen that way in Black communities. But disinvestment followed by speculation is very real. Natalie Moore argues the framing on all sides has been overstated.
For the high school students Myra Kwadja worked with, Obama was a celebrity — not a beacon of possibility. Their relationship with government was filtered entirely through daily police presence, making voting feel like just another form of being surveilled.
Natalie Moore and Myra Kwadja both lived two blocks from the Obamas on Greenwood Avenue. The South Side's relationship with Barack Obama was personal, physical, and possessive — not the abstract hero-worship of the rest of the country.
Obama advisor David Axelrod famously argued that nobody uses Jackson Park when advocating for building the center there. Myra Kwadja hears those words every time she bikes through for cherry blossoms or the house music picnic — because 'nobody' really means 'certain nobodies.'
Critics call it the Obamalisk. Architectural reviews of the Obama Center note that the building reads entirely differently depending on your vantage point — a gleaming beacon in the sun for tourists, a foreboding monolith for students across the street. Natalie Moore says the campus itself is beautiful, and draws a comparison to Chicago's Picasso statue, which was hated when it debuted.
Everyone feared the University of Chicago would use the Obama Center as cover for a land grab in Woodlawn. Natalie Moore's data reporting found the opposite: the city of Chicago was by far the biggest landholder in East Woodlawn, owning vacant lots from demolished homes. The city held the power to protect residents — and largely didn't use it.
The median sale price of a single-family home in Woodlawn has jumped 4.6 times in the past decade. Zillow now lists some homes in the neighborhood at $1 million. People have been displaced. The data is not ambiguous.
In 2017, Obama was directly asked whether the Obama Foundation would sign a community benefits agreement to protect housing. He declined, saying no group speaks for the whole community and that people should trust him. The irony: he built his entire political identity as a community organizer.
Myra Kwadja and Natalie Moore both have sharp critiques of how the Obama Center handled housing displacement. But they've had to be careful: national media — including secretly right-wing outlets — want to use their nuance as anti-Obama ammunition. Ideally nuanced critique, Kwadja says, can't become fodder for white supremacists.
A white-led group called Protect Our Parks sued repeatedly to stop the Obama Center from being built on public parkland — and courts rejected them every time. Natalie Moore notes that a group that doesn't otherwise advocate for equity choosing this particular fight is a very intentional, curious choice.
Analysis
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- Government 100%
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