Barack and Michelle Obama surprise Chicago students at opening of presidential center’s public library

Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama surprised Hyde Park elementary students at the Obama Presidential Center’s public library on Friday morning, just ahead of the doors opening to the public for the first time.

The Obamas came out to read Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic “Where the Wild Things Are.” They even acted out parts of the book during the 25-minute visit with students and staff from William H. Ray Elementary.

“Are you telling stories up in here?” the former president said to the children after walking into a main reading room.

He asked the kids for some riddles before starting to read. One student said, “What goes up but never does down?” The answer was “your age.”

“That’s only true for me. My wife, she’s getting younger,” Barack Obama said of the former first lady.

“No, I’m not,” she shot back.

The 5,000-square-foot library branch is adjacent to the main museum, where people posed for photos all morning, with some giving high fives to statues of the Obamas outside the museum. The Obamas opted to build a community library on the museum campus, instead of a traditional National Archives research hub seen at other presidential centers.

“This is your library, alright,” Barack Obama told the children. “And when I was your age, I loved books and I loved coming to libraries, even though sometimes the librarians would tell me to ‘shh’ because I was kind of loud.

“And I’m still kind of loud, my wife says. But I used to love just reading new books, and there are just tons of books here that you guys can read. … This is going to be your spot.”

The Obamas split the time reading, first Michelle Obama and then her husband. The children asked questions and acted out parts of the book, with Barack Obama asking them to roar, “gnash their terrible teeth” and “roll their terrible eyes.” The Obamas joined in on the acting.

During a section of the book about being “king of all the wild things,” Michelle Obama quipped that “there were no kings,” earning applause.

She also made some pointed references to President Donald Trump during the center’s dedication ceremony on Thursday, telling the crowd a lasting legacy “isn’t an award or name on a building or number of zeros in a bank account, but the difference we make in one another’s lives.”

Teachers and parents who were in the room said they weren’t told about the special guest readers. The students, ranging from kindergarteners to third graders, were the first school group to be invited to the new library. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also attended the reading.

The main reading room of the library features a 70-foot mural called “Reading Circles/Weaving Dreams/Seeding Futures” by artist Aliza Nisenbaum. And the nearby President’s Reading Room has 3,000 books personally selected by the Obamas. 

The library branch opened its doors to the public around 11 a.m. Friday for the first time. Visitors lined up to get a commemorative Obama Presidential Center public library card.

LeVar Burton, from the “Reading Rainbow,” and Mychal Threets, Burton’s successor, also read to the kids before the Obamas appeared.

Threets said he learned the Obamas would be reading to the children about five minutes before the event began. The Calfornia native came to Chicago specifically for the library opening and said he had to remember to “calm down and take a deep breath when they walked into the room.”

“This is pretty cool to be part of the opening of the library for the first Black president of the United States, especially on Juneteenth,” Threets said. “So it’s very special to be part of it.

I have my grandmother’s library card, and she wasn’t always able to have a library card. So to fast forward all this time forward, it’s a very special day.”