06/19/2026
Today, in Chicago, the doors open.
On the South Side, in Jackson Park, the Barack Obama Presidential Center welcomes the public for the very first time — and it opens, by design, on Juneteenth. The day this nation marks the end of American slavery is the day its first Black president takes his permanent place in the American record.
Sit with that a moment.
For as long as this country endures, there will be a presidential library bearing the name of a Black man — his papers, his presidency, his portrait preserved beside Washington’s, beside Lincoln’s, beside Roosevelt’s.
When Barack Obama laid his hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and took the oath of office in 2009, he closed a circle that began in bo***ge.
The man sworn in on the Great Emancipator’s Bible was the living answer to a promise Lincoln made and did not live to keep.
We preserve history here in McComb because we know what it cost.
We know the names.
The students of Burglund High School who walked out in 1961 rather than stay silent. Brenda Travis — sixteen years old, jailed for the crime of believing she was a citizen. Herbert Lee, shot dead in broad daylight for helping his neighbors register to vote. The men and women of this county who measured their distance from the polls, who were counted out, turned back, and buried before they ever cast a ballot they could trust.
Some of them lived to see January 2009. Some did not. But every last one of them is in that library in Chicago, whether their name appears on a wall or not — because there is no road to that oath that does not run straight through Pike County, Mississippi.
History does not move in a straight line. It moves like a tide. Reconstruction once gave Black Mississippians the vote and sent Black men into office — and within a single generation the backlash of 1875 erased nearly all of it, and held it erased for ninety years. Every step this country has taken toward the light has summoned its shadow. We are living in such a season now, when the very histories we labor to preserve are once again contested.
But here is what a historian knows that a headline does not: the record, once written, cannot be unwritten.
The doors are open today.
The library stands.
And it bears his name.
— McComb Historical Preservation Commission
* historic photograph-https://www.loc.gov/item/2017645540/
* Souza, Pete, photographer. Official portrait of President Barack Obama in Oval Office / Official White House photo by Pete Souza. 2012. Dec. 6. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017645540/
