MS NOW Exclusive | Hope Comes Home: Inside the Obama Presidential Center - Part 2
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Thank you so much. We are one people. We are all created equal.
Welcome back to Hope Comes Home inside the Obama Presidential Center. I'm Michelle Norris. This hour, we will take you further into the brand new Obama Presidential Center. We'll hear more from President Obama and we will hear from First Lady Michelle Obama. We sat down for an interview right here on the south side of Chicago, where she grew up and where the Obamas are bringing their legacy home. Chicago is a city that gets up in the morning and goes hard all day. Ambition, creativity, community. The hope that all that hard work pays off. Oprah Winfrey was born in Mississippi, but she became a media titan in Chicago. Same for Muddy Waters, who then helped Buddy Guy. When Ferris Bueller played hooky, he went to downtown Chicago.
The question isn't what are we going to do? The question is what aren't we going to do?
What is the Obama Presidential Center and why is it located on Chicago’s South Side?
Film, architecture, science, music. Oh, so much music. We wish you love and peace. Soul Train got its start here. This is a city that gifted the world with Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, Lou Rawls, and Ramsey Lewis. Let's not forget Jeff Tweedy, Billy Corgan, Eddie Vedder, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones. Shaka and Mavis, Kanye and Chance the Rapper. There's not a chance we could name them all. There are just too many. You see, Chicago has always been a cauldron for culture. The blues, the bulls. Here's Jordan.
He was all along.
the bear, and the bears.
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.
And all that jazz! And all that jazz!
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. For the Obamas, choosing the South Side is an expression of hope that Sweet Home Chicago can not just handle all of that, but thrive. Let me ask you about the neighborhood. It's in the South Side, on the South Side, on Stony Island, a street that is too often in the news for sometimes the wrong reasons. What does it mean to place this center in a place that doesn't usually see this kind of investment?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:16
2
What is the Obama Presidential Center and why is it located on Chicago’s South Side?
1:16–12:16
3
How did the South Side’s history and Great Migration shape the decision to site the Center in Bronzeville?
12:16–20:57
4
What plans are in place to address gentrification and ensure local residents benefit from the Center?
20:57–40:58
5
How does Michelle Obama describe growing up on the South Side and its decline due to disinvestment?
40:58–42:27
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Rachel Maddow Show
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