“When I first saw it, I was like, ‘It’s a block.’” Woodlawn resident Linda Spears had been watching the construction of the Obama Foundation’s sprawling campus from her condo overlooking Jackson Park in Chicago, but it wasn’t until opening weekend, when the barriers came down, that she finally went inside. Sitting on a bench near the Barack Obama Presidential Center’s playground, she recited the former president’s 2015 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march from memory, as if echoing the words that appeared on the facade behind us.

Spears explained that the museum tower at the Obama Presidential Center had actually been designed to resemble four hands reaching upward. She pressed her hands against those of a young woman beside her, as if playing patty-cake. “It’s like we’re all coming together,” she said.

I saw this demonstration of the four hands many times during opening weekend, literally gesturing toward Obama’s vision of the center as “not just a monument to my presidency” but “a tribute to all the people and the forces and the community that helped to make this so special.” It’s an inspirational story every American liberal knows by heart: Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a wayward twenty-three-year-old in a junky used car and left as the president of the United States. He envisioned the sprawling Obama Presidential Center campus as a thank-you gift to the city that created him, complete with a playground, a public library branch, gardens, and spaces for democratic education in a basement “forum.”