Former President Barack Obama returned to Chicago’s South Side on Thursday to dedicate his presidential center, telling a crowd of thousands that the campus “could not be any place else.”
Obama, who recalled first arriving in the city in 1985 to organize churches in the community battered by steel-plant closings, calling the site not a monument to himself, but “an expression of thanks” to the people who shaped him. He said its exhibits open not with his own story but with the story of the United States of America, and focus on the ordinary citizens and shared values he believes make democracy possible.
