Cory Booker

Cory Anthony Booker was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Harrington Park, New Jersey. His parents, Cary Alfred Booker and Carolyn Rose Booker, were civil rights activists and among the first Black executives at IBM. Booker became a high school football star before attending Stanford University, where he earned degrees in political science and sociology, played varsity football, served as senior class president, and led a student-run crisis hotline.

After Stanford, Booker received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where he earned an honors degree in modern history. He later attended Yale Law School and graduated with a juris doctor in 1997. While at Yale, he operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, participated in the National Black Law Students Association, and worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters as a mentor.

Booker began his political career in Newark at age 29, defeating four-term City Council incumbent George Branch in 1998. He drew attention to drug dealing and violence in the city by undertaking a 10-day hunger strike and living in a tent near areas affected by drug activity. He also became an advocate for education reform and City Hall transparency, although many of his council proposals were defeated by his colleagues.

In 2000, Booker spent five months living in a motor home on streets in some of Newark’s most crime- and drug-affected areas. His 2002 campaign for mayor against longtime incumbent Sharpe James was chronicled in the Academy Award-nominated documentary Street Fight, directed by Marshall Curry. Booker lost that election, founded the nonprofit Newark Now in 2003, and later returned to the mayoral race.

Booker won the 2006 Newark mayoral election in a landslide, defeating the candidate backed by Sharpe James with more than 72 percent of the vote. He also became known for personally responding to residents’ needs, including shoveling an elderly constituent’s driveway and patrolling the city’s streets.

In April 2012, Booker rescued a woman from a house fire and suffered second-degree burns on his hands and smoke inhalation. His visibility through social media, television appearances, and events such as the Democratic National Convention helped make him a nationally recognized mayor. He appeared several times on The Oprah Winfrey Show, including an appearance with Mark Zuckerberg connected to a $100 million education fund for Newark.

Booker announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in June 2013 to fill the New Jersey seat left vacant after the death of Senator Frank Lautenberg. He won the Democratic primary against Frank Pallone, Rush Holt, and Sheila Oliver, then defeated Republican Steve Lonegan in a special election on October 16, 2013. He was sworn into the Senate two weeks later and retained the seat in 2014 by defeating Republican Jeff Bell.

At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Booker delivered a primetime speech supporting Hillary Clinton and contrasting her political vision with that of Donald Trump. During Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2018, Booker released 12 pages of committee-confidential emails concerning racial inequality and said he accepted the possibility of expulsion from the Senate as a consequence.

In 2019, Booker introduced legislation to study the effects of slavery on generations of African Americans and the possibilities of reparations for descendants of enslaved people. His Senate work has also been associated with criminal justice reform, economic opportunity, and racial equality.

Booker announced his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on February 1, 2019, the first day of Black History Month. His campaign emphasized collective action and a unifying national identity, themes he also used in the video announcing his candidacy.

The campaign struggled to build sufficient momentum against Democratic contenders including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg. Booker failed to qualify for the sixth Democratic debate and suspended his presidential campaign in January 2020.

Booker dated actor Rosario Dawson for more than two years. They first met at a political fundraiser in 2018, met again later that year, and began a relationship that was publicly confirmed in March 2019.

Dawson later moved in with Booker in New Jersey. Their relationship ended by February 2022.