DALLAS (AP) — As people gather across the U.S. to celebrate Juneteenth on Friday, former President Barack Obama’s presidential center will open its doors to the public for the first time.Located on a sprawling campus on Chicago’s South Side, the center for the nation’s first Black president has been designed to inspire people to make the change they want to see in their own communities. It’s the kind of contemplation that also comes as Americans gather for Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S.The holiday marks June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Texas at the end of the Civil War with an order declaring the state’s enslaved people were free with “absolute equality” 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in the South.“Juneteenth represents not just a commemoration of the end of slavery but it’s also part of the ongoing struggle for absolute equality and that ideal in American life,” said W. Caleb McDaniel, a Rice University professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Sweet Taste of Liberty.”
Obama’s presidential center in ChicagoSeveral days of events have been planned for the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center, including a dedication ceremony held Thursday.The center’s public opening also arrives as a symbolic convergence of legacy and liberation. The nation is grappling with deepening political division and renewed questions about the arc of racial progress as the Supreme Court hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, endangering Black political representation in Congress.
