Cory Booker

Cory Anthony Booker (born April 27, 1969) is an American politician and lawyer serving as the senior United States senator from New Jersey, a seat he has held since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, Booker is the first African-American U.S. senator from New Jersey. He was the 38th mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013, and served on the Municipal Council of Newark for the Central Ward from 1998 to 2002.

Booker was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Harrington Park, New Jersey. He attended Stanford University, receiving a BA in 1991 and a master's degree a year later. He attended Queen's College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship before attending Yale Law School. He won an upset victory for a seat on the Municipal Council of Newark in 1998, staging a 10-day hunger strike and briefly living in a tent to draw attention to urban development issues in the city. He ran for mayor in 2002 but lost to incumbent Sharpe James. He ran again in 2006 and defeated Deputy Mayor Ronald Rice. Booker's first term saw the doubling of affordable housing under development and the reduction of the city budget deficit from $180 million to $73 million. He was reelected in 2010.

Booker was elected to the U.S. Senate in New Jersey's 2013 special election and reelected in 2014 and 2020. He became New Jersey's senior senator when Bob Menendez resigned on August 20, 2024.

Booker became the first senator to ever testify against another senator during attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions's 2017 confirmation hearing. Booker ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and suspended his campaign on January 13, 2020. From March 31 to April 1, 2025, he delivered the longest speech in U.S. Senate history, lasting 25 hours and five minutes, in protest of the second presidency of Donald Trump.

Early life and education

Booker was born in Washington, D.C.; he grew up in Harrington Park, New Jersey, 20 miles (32 km) northeast of Newark. His parents, Carolyn Rose (née Jordan) and Cary Alfred Booker (1936–2013), were among the first black IBM executives. Booker has said that he was raised in a religious household and that he and his family attended a small African Methodist Episcopal Church in New Jersey. Booker has Sierra Leonean ancestry, which he learned when featured on the PBS television program Finding Your Roots.

Booker graduated from Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, where he played varsity football and was named to the 1986 USA Today All-USA high school football team. He graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1991 and a Master of Arts in sociology in 1992. He played football for Stanford at tight end and was teammates with Brad Muster and Ed McCaffrey, making the All-Pacific-10 Academic team. He was elected senior class president. In addition, Booker ran The Bridge Peer Counseling Center, a student-run crisis hotline, and organized help from Stanford students for youth in East Palo Alto, California.

Booker was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford, earning a degree in United States history in 1994. At Oxford, Booker served as president of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society and became a close friend of Shmuley Boteach. He obtained his Juris Doctor in 1997 from Yale Law School and operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale, Booker was a founding member of the Chai Society (now Shabtai). He also was a Big Brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and active in the National Black Law Students Association.

Municipal Council of Newark

Contemplating advocacy work and a run for city council in Newark after graduating from law school, Booker lived in the city during his final year at Yale. After graduation, he served as staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York and program coordinator of the Newark Youth Project. In 1998, Booker won an upset victory for a seat on the Municipal Council of Newark, defeating four-term incumbent George Branch. To draw attention to the problems of open-air drug dealing and associated violence, he went on a 10-day hunger strike, living in a tent and later in a motor home near drug-dealing areas of the city. Booker also proposed council initiatives that affected housing, young people, law and order, and the efficiency and transparency of City Hall, but was regularly outvoted.

Mayor of Newark

Mayoral campaigns

2002 election

On January 9, 2002, Booker announced his campaign for mayor of Newark rather than running for reelection as councilman. That pitted him against longtime incumbent Sharpe James. James, who had easily won election four consecutive times, saw Booker as a real threat and responded with mudslinging. At one campaign event, James called him "a Republican who took money from the KKK [and] Taliban ... [who's] collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark." In the campaign James's supporters questioned Booker's suburban background, calling him a carpetbagger who was "not black enough" to understand the city. Booker lost the election, garnering 47% of the vote to James's 53%. The Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight chronicles the election.

During the campaign, Booker founded the nonprofit organization Newark Now.

2006 election

On February 11, 2006, Booker announced that he would run for mayor again. Although James filed paperwork to run for reelection, he announced shortly thereafter that he would instead cancel his bid to focus on his work as a state senator, a position to which he was elected in 1999. At James's urging, Deputy Mayor Ronald Rice decided to run for mayor. Booker's campaign, raising over $6 million, outspent Rice's 25 to 1, for which Rice attacked him. Booker, in turn, attacked Rice as a "political crony" of James. Booker won the May 9 election with 72% of the vote. His slate of city council candidates, known as the "Booker Team", swept the council elections, giving Booker firm leadership of the city government.

2010 election

On April 3, 2010, Booker announced his candidacy for reelection. At his announcement event, he remarked that a "united government" was crucial to progress, knowing his supporters in the city council faced tough reelections. Heavily favored to win, Booker faced former judge and Essex County prosecutor Clifford J. Minor and two minor candidates. Booker was reelected with 59% of the vote.

Tenure

Before taking office as mayor, Booker sued the James administration, seeking to terminate cut-rate land deals favoring two redevelopment agencies that had contributed to James's campaigns and listed James as a member of their advisory boards. Booker argued that the state's "pay-to-play" laws had been violated and that the land deals would cost the city more than $15 million in lost revenue. Specifically, Booker referenced a parcel at Broad and South Streets that would generate only $87,000 under the proposed land deals yet was valued at $3.7 million under then-current market rates. On June 20, 2006, Superior Court Judge Patricia Costello ruled in Booker's favor.

In late June 2006, before Booker took office, New Jersey investigators foiled a plot to assassinate him led by Bloods gang leaders inside four New Jersey state prisons. The motive for the plot was unclear, but was described variously as a response to the acrimonious campaign and to Booker's campaign promises to take a harder line on crime.

First term

Booker took office as mayor of Newark on July 1, 2006. After his first week in office, he announced a 100-day plan to implement reforms. The proposed changes included increasing police forces, ending background checks for many city jobs to help former offenders find employment in the city, refurbishing police stations, improving city services, and expanding summer youth programs.

One of Booker's first priorities was to reduce the city's crime rate. In furtherance of this, he appointed former deputy commissioner of operations of the New York City Police Department Garry McCarthy director of the Newark Police Department. Crime reduction was such a central concern of Booker's administration that he and his security team were known to personally patrol Newark's streets until as late as 4 a.m.

Booker was a member of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, a bipartisan group with a stated goal of "making the public safer by getting illegal guns off the streets". In October 2009, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave him the Sarah Brady Visionary Award for his work in reducing gun violence. During his mayoralty, crime dropped significantly in Newark, which led the nation in violent crime reduction from 2006 to 2008. March 2010 marked Newark's first murder-free month in over 44 years, although murder and overall crime rates began to rise again after 2008. In addition to his crime-lowering initiatives, Booker's first term saw the doubling of affordable housing under development, quadrupling of the amount under pre-development, and the reduction of the city budget deficit from $180 million to $73 million..