CHICAGO â Opening weekend visitors at the Presidential Center called the 44th president’s legacy an example of unifying, scandal-free “Black excellence,” while they lamented what they view as a dark turn for the U.S. under President Donald Trump.
“The community is great, we’re just kind of glad it’s here,” Lauren Tillman, who lives about 40 minutes outside of , told Fox News Digital. “We needed something like this. Chicago looks like a certain place to certain people who are not from the area… so I just think this brought everybody together, like, ‘oh there’s something for the community,’ for Black people, and on Juneteenth, so I thought that was great, too.”
The presidential center’s opening weekend began with a star-studded private ceremony and concert on Thursday night, and the 19.3-acre campus opened to the public on Friday during the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the day Black slaves were declared free in 1865.
“Just knowing that Chicago doesn’t always get the best rep, to know that we’ve had a Black president come from this place, and then to great,” said Ashley Woods, who joined Tillman at the opening.
“To know that [Obama] was going to try to do at least something for his people, that meant a lot to me and being here means a lot,” added Tillman.
“And I think, to piggyback off that, I think the legacy is Black excellence,” continued Woods. “Again, growing up in a place like Chicago, you don’t really think you can do much besides being a rapper or, you know, going into sports, but so see that somebody actually made it to the top per se, they were able to run the nation, there was very little scandal around him and his family, like it just shows you that we can be more than what America tells us we can be.”
Sheryl Rogers and Peggy Neely-Harris made the trip from for the weekend’s festivities.
“What it means for African Americans [is] a coming together, a reckoning, a remembrance of the excellence that is within each one of us, particularly in African Americans and particularly at this time when our very existence is under attack,” Rogers told Fox News Digital.
Neely-Harris agreed, and said that the brand new presidential center is a symbol of hope and renewal, and that the center is a “light in this present darkness.”
“[Obama] has left an excellent example of how you should live, what type of character you should have and the love of family and community,” Rogers continued. “You can see love just exudes from them, and I love to see love in action.”
“No scandal,” she added.
However, Obama did face some major scandals and controversies during his two terms in the .
Obama’s DOJ infamously seized records of Fox News’ phone lines, including a phone number that belonged to the parents of a reporter.
The seizure was approved after a warrant was granted by a judge, and in an affidavit seeking the warrant, an agent called reporter James Rosen a likely criminal “co-conspirator” in a violation of the Espionage Act.
Obama also faced government weaponization claims when his IRS allegedly slow-rolled the tax-exempt nonprofit approval of grassroots conservative organizations that set out to oppose his agenda.
Groups with words such as “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names were allegedly hindered from forming for months and years.
Operation Fast and Furious was another chart-topping Obama scandal.
ATF agents intentionally allowed illegal straw purchases of weapons near the U.S. southern border with , in hopes that tracking the firearms would lead them directly to high-level cartel kingpins. But the Obama-era agency failed to monitor at least 2,000 of the weapons, which did in fact make their way into the hands of dangerous characters.
One of the weapons in the ill-fated sting was used to kill Agent Brian Terry in 2010.
When, in 2012, then-Attorney General was subpoenaed during a House Oversight Committee
