A group of Chicago elementary school students were met by an unexpected visitor on Tuesday when former President Barack Obama walked in wearing a Santa hat and sat down to read to them.
The Burke Elementary School students were at the Bessie Coleman branch of the Chicago Public Library, where they were learning about leadership qualities.
As the students were learning, Obama walked into the library and asked, “How you guys doing?”
After making introductions, Obama began to read “Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight.”
The book recounts how Coleman, for whom the library branch is named, broke barriers to become the first Black female pilot.
Obama shared a video of his visit on X, saying he had a good time.
“I had fun reading to some Burke Elementary students at the Chicago Public Library today,” he wrote. “When the Obama Presidential Center opens next year, we’ll have a new branch of the library for the community to enjoy.”
FOX 32 in Chicago reported that Obama’s appearance was a sneak peek into the storytime programming that will be offered at the library branch coming to the Obama Presidential Center next June.
The center’s opening comes after years of delays and protests and more than a decade of planning.
“We’re going to open in June so that y’all don’t have to bring your coats up,” Obama said during a visit to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas last week, without revealing a firm opening date, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
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The presidential center’s site on Chicago’s South Side was announced in May 2015.
The center, which will include the presidential library, was projected to open in 2021 but has been tied up in lawsuits and federal reviews that have pushed the timeline back years.
The center will be home to the presidential library, a museum, an auditorium, a Chicago Public Library branch, a garden, an athletic facility and other attractions on its 20-acre campus.
“We want to create a campus, a place where the public gathers for a range of things that puts them face to face with each other and get them to meet and be in dialogue and conversation and exposed to new ideas with each other,” Obama said last week, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
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The $850 million project in Jackson Park was first hit with a years-long lawsuit in 2018 when a group called Protect Our Parks alleged that Chicago illegally transferred parkland to the private Obama Foundation. That court battle persisted until 2022, when a federal judge terminated a revised version of the suit.
The planned construction also sparked federal reviews because the project required an overhaul of roads in the area and because Jackson Park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Those reviews did not wrap up until late 2020, local media reported at the time.
Meanwhile, the Obama Foundation has celebrated the center as “a lively community hub, economic anchor, and beacon of democracy right here on the South Side of Chicago.”
A groundbreaking ceremony for the project was not held until 2021, with construction picking up in earnest in the last year.
Fox News Digital’s Emma Colton contributed to this report.
