IRONY: Community Organizers In Chicago Now Fighting Against Barack Obama And His Proposed Presidential Library

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: How tragically funny is this story? The man who rose to ultimate as a community organizer now comes back to his hometown where he railed against ‘corporate power’ to build a billion dollar library that will drive out the poor and middle class because rents will skyrocket. Now the very same people who helped launch his career are protesting him. Yet another object lesson on why black people should stop voting Democrat and being taken advantage of. Black unemployment under Democrat Obama reached massively high levels, and the same under the Republican Trump now show at historic lows. Hmm…anyone listening in Chicago?

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.”

Although the Obama Foundation has signed a private agreement with its contractors that guarantees minority hiring, local activists say it doesn’t provide enough public oversight of the project or address the issue of gentrification. It’s an ongoing battle that activists have taken all the way to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office, and that may have implications for next year’s aldermanic elections.

Obama now finds himself on the receiving end of the same demands his younger self once made to crusty Chicago politicians he derided as “ward heelers.” But, as the dispute plays out, Obama the former president is far more powerful than the City Hall bureaucrats and state senators he once badgered for resources—maybe too powerful for organizers to rally against. source

The post IRONY: Community Organizers In Chicago Now Fighting Against Barack Obama And His Proposed Presidential Library appeared first on Now The End Begins.