Early Political Career
After graduation, Booker served as Staff Attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York and Program Coordinator of the Newark Youth Project.
In 1998, Booker won an upset victory for a seat on the Newark City Council, defeating four-term incumbent George Branch. To draw attention to the problems of open-air drug dealing and the associated violence, Booker went on a 10-day hunger strike, and lived in a tent and later in a motor home near drug dealing areas of the city. He proposed Council initiatives that impacted housing, young people, law and order and the efficiency and transparency of City Hall, but was regularly outvoted 8–1. He also became an outspoken advocate of education reform.
Read more about this topic: Cory Booker
Famous quotes containing the words early, political and/or career:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.”
—Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)