His proposals included holding monthly office hours with residents to discuss city problems, placing more police on Newark streets, and establishing background checks for city jobs. Upon taking office, he initiated a 100-day plan to reform the city. The council elections also went favorably for Booker as all of the city council candidates who supported him were elected, giving him the power to implement the changes he, and they, had advocated during the campaign.Įven before taking office, Booker sued the city to stop municipal land sales to political contributors of the former mayor. Rice criticized Booker for raising over 6 million dollars for the campaign, which Booker went on to win handily with 72 percent of the vote. On May 9, 2006, Booker again ran for mayor of Newark and defeated Ronald Rice, the former deputy mayor and state senator. He was a partner in the West Orange Law Firm of Booker, Rabinowitz, Trenk, Lubetkin, Tully, DiPasquale, and Webster (2002-2006) and served on the Board of Trustees of Stanford University and the Executive Committee at Yale Law School. While he was out of office, Booker founded Newark Now, a non-profit community service organization in 2003.

He immediately proclaimed his intentions to campaign for the post again. In 2002, Booker ran for mayor of Newark against four-term incumbent Sharpe James and was defeated 53 percent to 47 percent. However, Booker was unable to make sufficient change from his city council post as his initiatives were often outvoted eight to one. He went on a ten-day hunger strike, pitching a tent in front of the Sunset Pines Housing Project to protest open-air drug dealing. He advocated school vouchers as part of a broad package of educational reform. His term on the council proved controversial. He became a community organizer, urging his tenant neighbors to fight crime and demand improvements in the projects.įrom Brick Towers, Booker, at age 29, upset a longtime incumbent to win a seat on the Newark City Council in 1998. Though Booker was raised in affluence in New Jersey, following his graduation from Yale he moved to Brick Towers, a crime-ridden public housing project in Newark’s Central Ward. While there he volunteered as a big brother and was active in the Black Law Students Association. from Yale Law School in Connecticut in 1997. Booker was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, one of few student athletes to do so, and went on to study at The Queens College in Oxford, England, where he garnered his third degree, Honors History in 1994.įollowing his studies at Stanford and Oxford, Booker earned his J.D. Booker played varsity football at Stanford and was named to the 1991 All-Pacific Ten Academic Team.

Following his graduation he enrolled at Stanford University in California where he earned a B.A. He attended Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan. Booker was raised in Harrington Park, New Jersey, a mostly white town where his parents Cary and Carolyn Booker, former civil rights activists and pioneer black executives at IBM, settled down. on April 27, 1969, Cory Booker is currently the United States Senator from New Jersey.

Sen booker