Cory Anthony Booker was born on April 27, 1969 in Washington, D.C. He grew up in Harrington Park, NJ, about twenty miles north of Newark. Booker was raised in a religious household; his family would often attend mass at the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As he got older, Booker played on the 1986 USA Today All-USA high school football team before graduating from Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan.
He went on to play football at Stanford University, making the All-Pacific-10 academic team and becoming senior class president. In 1991, he graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science, followed by a Master of Arts in sociology a year later. Booker then received a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford and, in 1994, received an honors degree in United States History as a member of the Queen’s College. Afterwards, he attended Yale Law School, operating free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, Connecticut.
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After graduating from law school, Booker worked as Staff Attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York, and Program Coordinator for the Newark Youth Project. Meanwhile, it was in 1998 that Booker won a seat on the Newark City Council; he went on a 10-day hunger strike and even stayed in a tent near drug-dealing areas to draw attention to drug-dealing and the associated violence in the city.
Booker became mayor of Newark in 2006, and again reelected in 2010. He fought hard to shape Newark into a safer, better city with more job opportunities throughout his run as mayor; all this before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013, where he currently works.
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