I could not have written this yesterday. I want to start there, because it is the truest thing I can tell you about the Obama Presidential Center. I walked out of that building emotionally wrung out and I got in the car, and I could not say a word, and anyone who knows me will tell you that silence is not my natural condition. It took a night's sleep and a long morning of staring at nothing before the thing would hold still long enough for me to look at it. Some experiences hit you so hard that language arrives late. This one arrived this morning, and it arrived with tears, and I have decided not to be embarrassed about that.
It started before I ever reached the door. My Uber pulled up on the South Side, I stepped out onto the sidewalk, craned my neck back, and there it was, cut into the stone at the top of the building, his words from Selma, that America is unconstrained by what is, that in this quest we grab for what ought to be. I stood there in the sun while strangers walked past me on their way to lunch and I could not read it through without my eyes flooding. I hadn't spoken to a single person. I hadn't seen a single artifact. I hadn't even gotten in line, and the building had already taken something out of me.
Inside, it begins so gently that you don't see what's coming. A little glazed handprint pressed into clay, Barry, 3. A schoolboy's notebook in careful cursive. A girl from the South Side who rode a bus more than an hour each way, twice a day, because her mother had decided that education was the whole ballgame, and whose high school counselor looked her in the face and told her she wasn't Princeton material. I stood in front of that panel thinking about every kid in Guilford County who has been handed some version of that same sentence by some version of that same adult, and about how thin the line is between the ones who are believed in and the ones who aren't.
And then, before it tells you a single thing about him, the museum turns and tells you about us. Wall after wall of the people who made 2008 possible and were never once on a ballot with him. Shirley Chisholm. Barbara Jordan. Harvey Milk. Judy Heumann, telling this country that disability only becomes a tragedy when we fail to provide what people need to live their lives. Women's liberation marchers. ACT UP kids screaming into a wall of official silence. Solidarity in Poland. A man standing alone in the road in front of a column of tanks. Not one of them lived to see the finish of the thing they gave their lives to. Every one of them pushed anyway. And standing there it dawned on me that the room I was about to walk into wasn't a beginning at all, it was a receipt. It was what happens when generations of un-famous people refuse to stop pushing and the pressure finally, finally gives.
Which is why the 2008 gallery takes you apart. The confetti. Michelle with the girls in her arms. A skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name saying out loud that there was no way somebody like him could win a statewide race, and then sixteen months later, there he was. But what stops you in that room is not the confetti. It is the math underneath it, what it actually took, and who actually did it. Millions of people who had been told their entire lives that this was simply not how America works went out and proved otherwise, in living rooms and church basements and union halls and barber shops, on foot, in the cold, knocking on the doors of strangers. Grandmothers who had been turned away from a ballot box in their youth stood in line for hours to cast one. And for one improbable stretch this country looked itself full in the face, told itself the truth about what it had been, and chose to be better anyway. Not perfect. Better. Together. Whatever else is true about today, that happened. We did that. It is in the record and nobody gets to take it out.
Then the museum walks you into the weight of it, and the weight is enormous. There is a replica of the Oval Office, and sitting on that desk is a small nameplate somebody gave him: Hard things are hard. Four words. I stood there longer than I stood anywhere else in the building. I have never held anything within a thousand miles of that job and those four words still landed in my sternum, because every person who has ever tried to move something heavy for other people knows exactly what they mean, and knows how lonely the knowing is.
And then came the room I have not been able to put down since. One room. One day. June 26, 2015. The Supreme Court rules that love is love and marriage is marriage, and the country erupts, and there on the wall are his words about how for all our differences we are one people, stronger together than we could ever be alone. And that same afternoon he boards a plane for Charleston to bury nine people who were murdered in their own church at Bible study. Joy and grief inside the same twenty-four hours. The doors thrown open and the caskets carried out on the same page of the same calendar. I stood in that gallery and wept, and I was not the only one weeping, and I understood something I have known intellectually my whole life but had never felt in my body all at once: that is America. That has always been America. The very best of us and the very worst of us reaching for the same microphone in the same hour.
What I did not expect was how relentlessly the building refuses to let that be a story about him. It is almost stubborn about it. On every single floor there is an on-ramp, a prompt, a station, a wall that stops narrating history, turns to you, and asks a question. Not admire this man. Not go be a president. It asks what you are going to do, where you already are, with what you already have, in whatever role you already hold. Be a neighbor. Coach a team. Run for the school board. Show up at the county commission meeting on a Tuesday night when nobody is watching. Organize your block. Feed somebody. Teach somebody. Sit with somebody who has no one sitting with them. One wall puts it in five words: we are the change that we seek. Another says the work of perfecting this union is a baton, handed forward, unfinished on purpose, and the only real question in any generation is whether somebody bends down and picks it up. I have spent my adult life in rooms where people talk about power as something you are granted. That whole building is an argument that power is something you pick up, and that almost nobody on those walls had permission when they picked it up.
Which brings me to the part I could not have said out loud yesterday.
My tears were not nostalgia. They were not about one man or one election or some golden era I would like to climb back inside of. My tears were about the country and the world we are handing our children. From the very beginning the American promise has been to close the gap, the distance between the ideals we wrote down and the reality we actually live in. Every generation is handed that gap and asked to make it narrower, and some of them made it dramatically narrower at costs I cannot fathom paying. And on a bad day right now it feels like we could be the first generation to hand our kids a gap that is wider than the one we were given. That is a terrifying thing to carry around a dark museum on a Wednesday afternoon, and I carried it from room to room like a stone in my coat.
But that building will not leave you there. It surrounds you, images, voices, sound coming at you from every direction at once, until you remember something that is not sentiment but simple historical fact: we have been here before. Every time it felt too dark. Every time it felt too big and too late and too far above the pay grade of ordinary people. Every time it felt larger than you, larger than all of us, larger than anything one person could possibly move, that is precisely when Americans from different places and different walks of life linked arms and pushed, and pushed this country toward ideals it had written down beautifully and never once delivered. They did not wait to be rescued. They were the rescue. They have always been the rescue. And so are we, if we decide to be.
The last thing I did was walk into a hall where the ceiling is a sky made out of Barack’s Selma speech, every word hand-stamped by the artist, layer on layer on layer, thousands of them radiating outward from a single square of white light. Up close you can read them one at a time. Step back and they dissolve into light. I put my head back and looked up into it with wet eyes and thought about my children, and about what it would mean for them to inherit a country still capable of that much light.
And then I stood and listened to his farewell address. He knew what was coming. You can hear it in his voice, he knew. And he stood there anyway and asked us to believe. Not in his ability to bring about change. In ours.
He reminded us that the highest office in this land is not Senator. It is not President. It is Citizen.
I hold one of those offices by the grace of the people of Guilford County, and only for as long as they will have me. I hold the other one for life, and so do you. It came with your birth certificate or your naturalization papers, it has never once expired, and it does not require anybody's permission to exercise.
So, it falls to each of us. Link arms. Be the light that chases out the dark. Our children are counting on a generation that refuses to hand them a wider gap than it was given, and that generation is not coming from somewhere else. It is us. It is you. It always was.
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