By EDWARD MCCLELLAND I Politico
Scott
Olson/Getty Images
Locals in the former president’s hometown worry that the new Obama
Center will leave them out.
It’s the ultimate in irony: The world’s most famous
ex-community organizer is facing a minor uprising from the community where his
presidential center is supposed to be built—the same community, in fact, where
he got his start in politics.
The center’s troubles became clear last September, when
Jeanette Taylor, the education director of the Kenwood Oakland Community
Organization, walked into the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago with
something on her mind.
She was there for a public meeting with officials from
the Obama Foundation, the entity that is building the Obama Center—a monument
to the career of former President Barack Obama for which construction is
scheduled to begin later this year in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South
Side of Chicago.
Taylor so wanted to be first in line for the microphone that
nearly a dozen of her fellow community organizers had camped out overnight to
save her a spot at the front of the line to get into the event.
As she entered the hotel ballroom, Taylor expected to
interrogate a member of the foundation’s staff. Instead, she found herself face
to face with Obama himself, appearing by video conference from Washington.
“The library is a great idea, but what about a community
benefits agreement?” Taylor asked, referring to a contract between a developer
and community organizations that requires investments in, or hiring from, a
neighborhood where a project is built. “The first time investment comes to
black communities, the first to get kicked out is low-income and working-class
people. Why wouldn’t you sign a CBA to protect us?”
Measured as always, Obama began by telling Taylor, “I was
a community organizer.” Then he said, “I know the neighborhood. I know that the
minute you start saying, ‘Well, we’re thinking about signing something that will
determine who’s getting jobs and contracts and this and that’ … next thing I
know, I’ve got 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork.”
The answer infuriated Taylor, who pays $1,000 a month for
the Woodlawn apartment she shares with her mother and two children, and is
worried that the Obama Center’s cachet will drive up neighborhood rents.
Months
later, she is still furious at the former president.
“He got a lot of nerve saying that,” Taylor told me. “He
forgotten who he is. He forgot the community got him where he is.”
Taylor is not alone in her complaint.
Since 2016, more
than a dozen local groups—neighborhood organizations, labor unions and tenants’
rights activists—have come together to form the Obama Library South
Side Community Benefits Coalition, which is pushing the library to account for
local needs.
At the University of Chicago, where Obama once taught
at the law school, more than 100 faculty members signed a letter in January
supporting the demands of local organizers.
“There are concerns that the Obama
Center as currently planned will not provide the promised development or
economic benefits to the neighborhoods,” the letter reads. “It looks to many
neighbors that the only new jobs created will be as staff to the Obama Center.”
…
It is probably no surprise to Obama that activists in the
neighborhood he chose for his presidential library are now clamoring for a
place at the table: Woodlawn is one of the birthplaces of community organizing.
Saul Alinsky, whose book Rules for Radicals informed Obama’s
own organizing, helped found The Woodlawn Organization to battle the expansion
of the University of Chicago (which today is proposing to build a 15-story hotel for Obama Center
visitors).
The campaign for a community benefits agreement is part of a
tradition that both predates Obama’s arrival in Chicago and made his career
there possible in the first place.
…
Woodlawn is a poor, African-American neighborhood
adjacent to middle-class Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago.
Woodlawn
residents worry that their neighborhood is an ideal target for gentrification,
and that the center will raise rents.
Jeanette Taylor originally moved to
Woodlawn because she was priced out of Bronzeville, a historically black
neighborhood closer to downtown that Chicago Agent magazine
calls “the next most-desired neighborhood for developers and homebuyers.”
Taylor says she doesn’t want to move again, and she is surely not the only
one—just 24 percent of Woodlawn residents own their homes.
…
For them, Obama has gone from sticking it to the man to …
being the man.
“Of course, he would have,” says Jeanette Taylor. “But
now he’s part of the establishment.”
Edward McClelland is author of “Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making
of a Black President and How
to Speak Midwestern.”
