Senator Cory Booker

Senator Cory Booker is the junior United States senator from New Jersey. He was born in Washington, D.C. A star high school athlete at Northern Valley High School in Old Tappan, Sen. Booker received a football scholarship to Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. While at Stanford, he ran a crisis hotline for students and worked with disadvantaged youth in East Palo Alto. He later attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar where he ran a student tutoring and mentoring program in a disadvantaged community before earning his law degree from Yale University where he helped lead free legal clinics for New Haven residents. 

Sen. Booker won a special election to fill the term of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg to become New Jersey’s first African American senator and only the twenty-first person in American history to ascend directly from mayor to senator. In February 2019, Sen. Booker announced his campaign to run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2020 election.

Sen. Booker’s 2016 autobiography is titled United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good.