The Obama Presidential Center’s unrelenting marketing campaign and weekslong soft opening have inspired an avalanche of opinions and emotions. For me, one feature rises above all: the new Obama Presidential Center branch of the Chicago Public Library. The 5,000-square-foot space in the center’s plaza is free and accessible to all.
Unlike its peers, the Obama Presidential Center will not house the thousands of artifacts and documents that recorded his saga.
A National Archives and Records Administration-run research facility is not part of the Obama center’s campus, WBEZ Chicago reports. “So technically, it’s not a library. All the material will instead be stored remotely but available to researchers online.”
Instead, the public library will be the first to be installed in a presidential center, with a general collection of 16,000 books.
Books fed Obama’s life.
“When I was young, I used to love libraries, love reading,” Obama told a group of students during a 2015 visit to the Anacostia Library in Washington, D.C.
In his 30s, as he launched his political career, Obama published a well-received memoir. “Dreams From My Father” told the story of his search for meaning as a biracial Black man in America.
Obama touted his favorite reads throughout his presidency. It is said that a stack of books was a mainstay on his bedside table in the White House.
At the Obama public library, I was greeted by gleaming wood shelves and stacks of colorful tomes, and shimmering light streaming through its floor-to-ceiling windows. On one wall is a 70-foot-long mural depicting storytelling and community life on Chicago’s South Side — “Reading Circles/Weaving Dreams/Seeding Futures” by artist Aliza Nisenbaum.
The President’s Reading Room offers up to another 3,000 books personally selected by Obama and his wife, Michelle. There are plans to eventually scale up to 12,000 books.
On one shelf sits an old-fashioned, working record player. On another are LPs by musical artists Prince and Stevie Wonder, Obama favorites.
In a reading garden adjacent to the library is “Book Bird,” one of the final works of the late Richard Hunt, the internationally acclaimed, Chicago-born sculptor.
It “will depict a bird taking flight from a book to illuminate how reading and learning allows readers to enter new places and fly free,” according to the center’s website.
Hunt’s mother, Etoria Inez Henderson Hunt, was one of Chicago’s first Black public librarians.
The reading room is “probably the most serene space in the entire OPC complex,” Tribune architecture critic Edward Keegan writes. “It’s programmatically reminiscent of the Toni Morrison Reading Room in Lorain, Ohio — a space conceived by the writer shortly after she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in 1993.”
Serenity is a priceless gift. On my visit, I paused to breathe in the learning, history and the healing power of words. I didn’t want to leave the place.
I harked back to my childhood, when every Saturday morning, my mother would march me to the Hall library branch in Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side.
Walk in with a high stack of books, then walk out with a new set of fresh, exciting choices. Go home and read. And read.
In high school, I worked part time as a page at the South Shore branch, where the nerdy but wise librarians taught me to catalogue and cherish their beloved books.
Like me, the children and families in the neighborhood surrounding the Obama center face social and economic inequities.
At this warm library, “they can” — as Obama would exhort. They can drink in the literature selected by America’s first Black president. Here, they can learn that a Black child can grow to a president — and will again. They can turn pages full of dreamy tales, intellect and growth. Pages that teach us all to imagine, learn, teach and build. Books are an essential ladder to the future.
Books represent truth, facts, analysis, all values that should be treasured and embraced but are now under assault in some quarters. We are in a time when libraries, museum exhibits, public media and more have been banned, censored and defunded.
This library will be a gift to the community, where we can seek credibility and substance. A literary sanctuary.
After the Obamas and the Bidens and the Bushes and the Clintons and the Trumps have faded away, books will remain.
That little library at the Obama center and all it represents put a powerful punctuation mark on all that we need to know.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Wednesday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
