The threads connecting the Obama Presidential Center to Hyde Park and the South Side began with a hopeful want ad from a Chicago organizer and piqued interest from a recent college graduate searching for something more. It was 1985 and Jerry Kellman needed help. Barack Obama needed a deeper purpose.
And so began a chain of events that changed American history and led to this moment of anticipation on the South Side. The Obama Center opens Friday on a sprawling Jackson Park campus, and arrives with the kind of optimism that defined his first presidential campaign.
Almost 20 years ago, that campaign became synonymous with the ideals of hope and change. The former punctuated Shepard Fairey’s famous poster. The latter appeared in the official campaign motto: “Change we can believe in.” Now the presidential center aspires to be a catalyst on the South Side, where change can sometimes be slow, and hope hard to come by.
As the opening approached, workers in recent weeks raced to complete the final touches. Fresh sod and newly planted trees line 19 acres filled with event spaces, parks, indoor basketball courts and a public library. The 225-foot granite tower at the figurative center of it all, home to a museum, took almost five years to rise over Stony Island Avenue.
In another way, though, the center has been 41 years in the making, with a foundation built atop that old classified ad. Kellman placed it in a monthly called “Community Jobs.” Obama saw it — he called the publication “a do-gooder rag,” Kellman later learned — in the New York Public Library.
He recently recalled the origin story over breakfast at Manny’s, the South Loop cafeteria and deli Obama often frequented during his 2008 run to the White House. As Kellman told it, he was searching for a certain kind of candidate. The usual requisites applied but race mattered, too, because “I was white,” Kellman said, and he knew he needed someone who was not.
His new hire for the Developing Communities Project was destined to work on the South Side, with a focus in Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens public housing community. The job wore people down and was open only because Kellman’s previous employee suffered a breakdown.
The experience left Kellman “nervous,” he said, “about hiring young adults and putting them in difficult situations.” When he met Obama he remained skeptical. Why would someone well-educated with options want this? And besides, was Obama resilient enough?
“What I would tell people is that you have to be really smart to be an organizer,” Kellman said. “You’ve got to be strategic. You have to cope with a lot of things you’ve never seen before. But if you’re smart enough to be an organizer, then you should be smart enough not to be an organizer.”
The offer came with a salary of $10,000, plus $2,000 for a car. Obama headed west, two years after his graduation from Columbia, and settled into a modest apartment in Hyde Park. As Kellman remembered, Obama did not arrive with political ambition but instead aspired to be a novelist.
His earliest days in Chicago — riding around the South Side and learning from Kellman, attempting to make connections with patrons of Black churches as part of those organizing efforts, finding an identity in Hyde Park — changed him and set him on his path.
These days Kellman wonders, like many, whether the presidential center can live up to its lofty promise. Some of the hope surrounding it reminds him of the late 2000s, when there was hope of connecting the White House with grassroots movements of change and “it didn’t happen.”
“Not in a malicious way,” Kellman said. “Just in the way that (stuff) happens.”
Now 40 years later comes the question, amid a full-circle moment, of how the presidential center can possibly live up to its grand promise. In the place that shaped Obama, how might his center shape the South Side?
**
Tony Coye pondered the thought while his clippers buzzed and a young boy sat in his chair at the Hyde Park Hair Salon on Blackstone Avenue, just off of 53rd Street. Obama’s old chair — where he sat for haircuts every two weeks, for years — was steps away, encased in glass. His presidential center may have a lot of memorabilia, but it won’t have that.
“It’s still very much a consistent thing,” Coye said, that people walk in to see the chair and look at the pictures. It’s a barbershop of repute. Muhammad Ali came here in the 1970s. Harold Washington was a regular during his years as mayor. The shop was still a block away in its old location, now occupied by Virtue restaurant, when Obama discovered it in 1985.
He wrote about the shop in his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” and it’s not hard to imagine a mid-20s Obama becoming entranced with such a place. He’d moved often then, from Hawaii to Indonesia and back; to Los Angeles for two years at Occidental; to New York for Columbia and then to Hyde Park, where the barbershop came to feel like home.
It was a place that helped him form an identity, surrounded by older Black men who welcomed him. A place that offered an informal education, where talk of Washington and city politics mixed with lighter topics. It might’ve been the place that helped Obama become a Sox fan, or where he first learned about a young Bulls player named Michael Jordan.
“We call it the University of Hyde Park,” one of the barbers, Zariff, said recently. “Yeah, all kinds of minds come through.”
For more than 25 years, Zariff has been Obama’s barber. He gave Obama his signature cut before his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and, during Obama’s years as president, Zariff often traveled to Washington to continue his duties. He’s a quiet man, and private, and he didn’t share his age during a recent interview or want to give his real last name.
“Smith,” Zariff said with a smile, riffing on the pseudonym for the shop — “Smitty’s” — Obama used in his book. The shop has been a part of the fabric of the neighborhood for a long time. It’s conceivable that the most influential American athlete of the 20th century could’ve sat in the same chair as Chicago’s first Black mayor, who might’ve left it warm for the man who’d become the country’s first Black president.
When Obama spent a few days home last December — and locals can always tell by the security outside his house and on either side of Greenwood Avenue — he visited his old barbershop. His foundation posted a video of it, with Obama greeting Zariff with a wide smile and a hug.
“With the center opening, we’ll be spending more time here,” Obama said, listing the highlights. “You’ve got the playground, and the park. And then you’ve got Michelle’s garden. There’ll be a restaurant over there.”
In parts of the South Side, though, there’s a built-in wariness about change. If the Obama Center is going to redefine the area, with ripples extending into less fortunate parts of the South and West Sides, it might follow a trajectory as improbable as Obama’s own, from local organizer to president.
There’s skepticism. Concerns about gentrification. An uneasiness about unintended consequences.
“There’s good and bad to it,” Coye, the barber near Obama’s old chair, said one morning a couple weeks before the center’s opening. “I think that for the economy, the local economy, it’ll do great.” But he feared that some longtime locals, particularly in Woodlawn, just south of the center, might be “priced out” as property values rise in the years to come.
What might be lost amid any gains? It’s the sort of debate that has played out in the shop forever.
“Change is inevitable,” Zariff said during a break between clients. “It’s definitely going to change (the area). I’m pretty sure a lot of people have concerns but, progress — that’s the trade-off to it.”
**
A block west along 53rd, a small marker at the intersection with Dorchester Avenue commemorates where Obama and Michelle Robinson, as she was known then, shared their first kiss, over ice cream. It was the summer after he’d left his first Chicago job to attend Harvard Law, only to return for the internship where he met his future wife at a downtown firm.
The first home they shared is a few blocks east, toward the lake, and the red brick Colonial-revival they bought when Obama became a U.S. senator is a few blocks west, off Greenwood. Given the roots, and that Michelle grew up nearby in South Shore, it might come as a surprise that not everyone embraced the Obama Center’s arrival in their backyard.
“I said to some of my neighbors who were opposed that we hadn’t had a presidential library in how many — 200 years of the existence of the city of Chicago,” said Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president who shares deep Hyde Park roots. “And we’re unlikely to have one in the next 200 years, so we ought to be very grateful and enjoy it.”
Anticipation is palpable in some places more than others. At Valois, the diner where Obama became a regular, and where he sat with Lester Holt for the final national television interview of his presidency, tourists are coming in more often to glimpse the menu at the front — “President Obama’s favorites,” it reads — and to take in some of the history.
Not long ago, Gianni Colamussi, one of the owners, encountered a group that’d come to the South Side hoping to see the center. It didn’t open until June 19, Colamussi told them. His restaurant is now 105 years old and though it has expanded in the years since Obama started coming in, the character remains unchanged.
It’s still cash only. The charmingly gruff man who takes orders has worked there for 50 years. The woman who hands customers their coffees down the line has been there for decades, too.
“I’ve been knowing President Obama since long before he was president,” she said one recent afternoon, adding she had no time to talk because she’d started work early, and was ready to leave.
The table where Obama sat with Holt has been preserved with Obama’s portrait. Customers seek it out. Time stands still inside Valois, where workers still wear soda jerk hats of a different era, but the world moves fast outside. Along 53rd Street, Colamussi has watched local businesses struggle. Mom and pops fight to hang on. A Chick-fil-A moved in next door. A Barnes & Noble opened nearby, encroaching on local bookstores already facing challenges.
The center, he hopes, “will be an incredible thing for us.” He has visions of customers on their way to or from it stopping in for one of Obama’s favorites; taking a coffee from the same hands that served Obama all those years ago. More broadly, there’s hope the center will be a boon to an area that has long fought for attention and resources more common on the North Side.
Still, “I think it’ll be a challenge, frankly,” Preckwinkle said of the prospect of economic development. She referenced the Museum of Science and Industry, and how people “park in the garage and go to the museum and leave.” The Obama Center is designed differently. From its garage, visitors will first have to go outside.
The hope is to encourage people to spend time in the park. To guide them into the community.
**
In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote that he “had all but given up on organizing” when he heard from Kellman, now 76 and with thinning gray-white hair. At Manny’s last month, Kellman considered his role in history — that if he hadn’t hired Obama, maybe none of this happens. Not the political rise or the presidency; not the tower of hope on the South Side.
“Not maybe,” Kellman said. “Definitely,” though he downplayed his part.
“I didn’t do anything, right? He sent me a resume. And if I’m not smart enough to hire Obama, I’m pretty stupid.”
Kellman takes little credit for Obama’s journey, with one exception: his development as a speaker. As he told it, “Barack can be a little cerebral at times,” and when he arrived in Chicago he spoke more like an Ivy League academic than someone with a talent for “talking in plain language, connecting with people.” To be a successful organizer, that had to change.
And so as part of Obama’s early responsibilities, Kellman sent him to Black churches throughout the South Side. Part of it was that Obama needed to win over some of their leaders and congregations. But the Sunday services and the sermons offered an education.
“The best speakers I ever heard in my life,” said Kellman, shaped by the Civil Rights Movement, “are Black pastors. So in that sense, getting the cadence and all of that was really critical.”
At the presidential center, several lines from one of Obama’s most memorable speeches adorn the top of the tower. They wrap around a corner, facing the south and west. He delivered them in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of the marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
“You are America,” the passage begins, and the 100 words that follow underscore the power of “we” — “We the people. We shall overcome. Yes we can.” — and the collective responsibility “to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”
Obama gave thousands of speeches as president, including one at Hyde Park Academy. He visited in 2013, months after Sandy Hook and days after a Chicago 15-year-old named Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a Kenwood park. A week before she died, Pendleton had gone to Washington to perform at Obama’s second inauguration.
In his speech then, Obama tried to rally support for “common-sense” gun control. He spent most of it, though, addressing root causes and community failures.
“We all share a responsibility, as citizens, to fix it,” he said then.
The Obama Center is, in a way, an old community organizer’s attempt at addressing problems that still plague his community. In April came another reminder that the fight continues. A sophomore at Hyde Park Academy was shot and killed at a bus stop after school. It happened a short walk from the center, the tower rising over the street.
By then, the campus was nearly complete. The words from the Selma speech had been installed, facing the parts of the city the center is most trying to reach. Its success, and whether it can be a true agent of change and hope, might well depend on how the message gets through.
