At the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on Thursday, former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama delivered speeches before a crowd of international dignitaries, elected officials and Democratic supporters.
The Obamas lavished Chicago with praise.
Mrs. Obama, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, urged Chicagoans to visit the center, which includes a campus of buildings, parks and basketball courts, and make it part of their community.
“Be inspired by the world-class art, check out the books from the public library — and bring them back on time,” she said. “Drop some beats in the recording studio and hit some corner 3s at Home Court. Hold birthday parties, jump-start clothing drives, host citywide cleanup days here.”
Mr. Obama reminisced about the day in 1985 when he arrived in Chicago as a young man, driving a “janky” car filled with his possessions.
“I didn’t know anybody in Chicago, but I had been inspired by the civil rights movement, and I knew I wanted to make a difference, although I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do that.”
It was in Chicago where he found his purpose, his faith and his community, he said, “friendships that would last a lifetime.”
Without naming names, Mrs. Obama delivered a sharp rebuke to Mr. Obama’s political critics.
After eight years in the “crucible” of the White House, she told her husband, “not once did you melt from the heat.”
Mr. Obama, she said, had endured “claims that a U.S. senator and constitutional law expert wasn’t qualified for the job.”
“The lies about your birthright and your faith and your patriotism,” Mrs. Obama said. “The outrage when you stated the biological fact that if you’d had a son, that he, too, would be Black.”
How absurd, Mrs. Obama said, “to even imagine that you might have buckled under the pressure, lost your temper, lashed out in frustration. That you might have done anything but make our family and this entire country proud.”
Mrs. Obama implicitly took on President Trump, suggesting the new center as a “respite.”
When visitors come to the Obama center, Mrs. Obama said, she hopes they feel the joy of “achieving something together.”
“That can be hard to grasp right now, when everything feels so upside down, when fact and fiction run together, when some folks seek to stifle speech, limit access to education, devalue diversity, erase the inconvenient parts of our history, when our phones constantly buzz with the latest outrage,” she said. “So I hope that this place can offer a respite from all that, at least for a little while. I hope it can reignite the optimism and empathy and ambition that has always powered this country’s greatest change.”
Mr. Obama nodded to a “new generation” of leaders and urged unity.
Mr. Obama said that he remains convinced that the current state of division in the United States is not what the “overwhelming majority” of Americans want. Instead, he said, people want “fairness and common sense and mutual respect.”
“Deep in our gut, we want to find a way to turn toward each other again,” he said. “I believe this because I’ve seen it all around our country.”
Referring to the activism in Minnesota in response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, Mr. Obama commended “ordinary people” who were “braving frigid temperatures and risking their own safety” to protest.
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