Cory Booker Biography

Cory Booker has been a U.S. senator from the state of New Jersey since 2013. He is the state’s first-ever African-American senator.

The child of two IBM executives, Cory Booker graduated from New Jersey’s Northern Valley Regional High School in 1991. He then played varsity football at Stanford University, earning his undergraduate degree in political science in 1991, and following it with a master’s degree in Sociology in 1992. He then studied at Queen’s College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving a degree in History in 1994,, after which he earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997.

He began a legal services nonprofit in Newark, then was elected to the Newark city council in 1998. In 2006 he was elected mayor, running with a promise to promote better housing, more jobs, less crime, and address other inner-city Newark problems. As mayor he also gained fame for his social media savvy: in a major 2010 snowstorm he responded to citizen requests for help on Twitter, sending city plows or arriving on doorsteps himself to shovel out trapped families.

After New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg died in office in 2013, Cory Booker won a special election to replace him on October 16, 2013. He won re-election for a full six-year term in 2014.