CHICAGO -- Saying its earlier decision to not release papers relating to a school reform foundation that Barack Obama had worked with and which was linked to 1960s radical activist Bill Ayers, "had been called into question," the University of Illinois at Chicago announced it will release records documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Although the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge had been at the UIC library since 2002, the school denied requests to review them, saying the donor had not given ownership rights to UIC.
UIC announced its archive of documents from the Annenberg Challenge will be available for public inspection at the Special Collections Department of the UIC library on Tuesday.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was formed in April 1995 to fund education reform initiatives in Chicago. Ayers, an education professor at UIC, was one of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge's founders. Since it ceased operations in January 2002, its records have been archived at the Special Collections Department of the UIC library.
"UIC’s authority to grant public access to the archives was recently called into question," according to a release Friday from the school. "University officials promptly initiated a thorough inquiry into the legal circumstances of the gift and its custody of the documents. Pending resolution of this challenge, access to the archives in their secure location was temporarily suspended.
"The University determined that the terms of the gift have been fulfilled and that it has the legal authority to allow public access to its archive of Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents in accordance with the customary procedures of the Special Collections Department of the UIC library," the release said.
Ayers was also a founder of the Weatherman organization, later known as the Weather Underground Organization, which espoused violence as a necessity for political change.
Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
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