Barack Obama hopes new library and museum campus will transform Chicago’s South Side

Ahead of Tuesday afternoon’s groundbreaking for the Obama Presidential Centre in Chicago’s Jackson Park, the former president reiterated the project’s potential to transform the South Side, with the same idealistic fire that catalysed his own career in public service years ago.

His pitch comes despite an enduring legal battle against his use of parkland and as local activists planned a protest outside the future site of the presidential centre to call for more affordable housing protections.

“We are ready to get going,” Barack Obama said in an interview released on Tuesday morning by ABC’s Good Morning America. “And I am absolutely confident that when this thing is done … the young person who’s grown up across the street, or down the block, or a few miles away, now suddenly (has) a place where concerts and speeches and debates and forums are taking place.”

Obama’s message of hope arrives at a South Side still aching from the coalescing crises of the coronavirus pandemic, the subsequent economic recession and a rise in violent crime, as well as recent civil unrest over police shootings. But in his interview, the nation’s first black president said his centre will not leave behind the community that launched his political journey.

“Something I wanted to get done that I couldn’t get done was get smarter, common sense gun safety measures in place through Congress,” Obama said when asked about Chicago’s troubling murders. “But what we can do is potentially give young people the sense that there’s another way for them to empower themselves. … Those young people matter.”