Michele Norris
speaker
715 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jun
Michele Norris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You see, Chicago has always been a cauldron for culture.
The blues, the bulls.
Here's Jordan.
the bear, and the bears.
Writers Sandra Cisneros and Studs Terkel, Dan Aykroyd, and all those stars from the Second City comedy troupe, the ones who made Saturday Night Live, Sparkle, and Pop.
Chicago the City begat Chicago the Musical.
The Windy City has long been a jewel on the shores of Lake Michigan, a big and shiny magnet for waves of newcomers looking for a better life.
Immigrants from Poland, Ireland, and Latvia, from Mexico and China, seekers trading small towns for big city life, refugees fleeing oppression in the Jim Crow South.
In the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans headed north and poured into Chicago's South Side, striving for a better future.
Thousands, including my father and his five brothers.
When they first landed in Chicago, they all lived together not far from what is now the Obama Presidential Center in a neighborhood known as Bronzeville.
A black president in their lifetime was not a possibility.
My dad used to say that Chicago has a great front yard with the power and prosperity concentrated in those gleaming skyscrapers along the lake downtown.
But the backyard, he would say, needs some work.
He loved Chicago, especially Bronzeville, but he understood something essential about the city's South Side.
Along with the solid institutions and one of America's largest black middle-class populations, the South Side has also seen its share of hardship.
Poverty, gang violence, underperforming schools, and under-resourced public housing.
The new presidential center sits across the street from a striving public school that lost a student this year to gunplay.
The Obamas could have located their campus closer to downtown Chicago, a focal point for tourists from all over the world.
But they came back to the South Side, back to the place where they raised their daughters, where Michelle Obama grew up with the goal of changing the footprint and the fortunes of the South Side with new jobs, new visitors and, yes, new pressures from gentrification.
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