Cory Booker
*Cory Booker was born on this date in 1969. He is a Black lawyer and politician.
Born in Washington, D.C., Cory Anthony Booker grew up in Harrington Park, New Jersey, north of Newark, New Jersey. His parents, Carolyn Rose (née Jordan) and Cary Alfred Booker, were among the first Black executives at IBM. Booker was raised in a religious household, and his family attended a small African Methodist Episcopal Church in New Jersey. One of Booker's maternal great-grandfathers was white, and Booker also has Native American ancestry.
Booker graduated from Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan and was named to the 1986 USA Today All-USA high school football team. He earned an undergraduate degree (1991) and a graduate degree (1992) from Stanford (where he played varsity football). Then, he studied in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, getting another graduate degree in American history in 1994.
A graduate of the Yale College of Law (1997), Booker started his legal career in non-profits but was soon elected to the Newark City Council and started his political career in 1998. After only four years on the city council, Booker ran for mayor in 2002 but lost. He ran again in 2006, having earned a reputation as a champion for the underprivileged and a champion at fundraising, and won. As Mayor of Newark, Booker gained national attention, thanks in part to his connections to high-powered celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Mark Zuckerberg and because of newsworthy street heroics, such as saving a neighbor from a burning house, saving a dog from the cold and shoveling snow from a constituent's driveway.
New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg died in June 2013, and Booker won a special election to replace him in October. He was sworn in as a U.S. Senator on 31 October 2013. In 2019, Booker formally pushed to become President of the United States.
