Cory Booker

I'm in this weird state in my life where I am incredibly excited. I literally get up every morning with this amazing enthusiasm about what can be, but this very deep, sobered understanding of what is. I feel this, amazing, awesome, sense of a vision about where we are could go as a country, what I desperately believe is our destiny.

But I get very humbled when I look at the challenges. And I wanna jump into this in a way that, you may not, expect. But I would like to take us to what is a reality for thousands and thousands of Americans, and a moment of mine when I wasn't in elected office.

I was two. It was two thousand and four. It was April. My father was visiting me for my birthday, and I we were taking a walk in my neighborhood. I lived, at that point, in the central ward of Newark.

Newark is a city of great diversity, with wealthy neighborhoods, with poor neighborhoods. This was one of the poorer census tracts in our city. I was living in some high-rise public housing projects.

And we were walking down the road, and I'll never forget the gunshots that rang out. Sounded like cannon fire, 'cause it echoed between many of the buildings. And I turned around to see, kids running down the hill towards me, screaming.

And I sprinted through the children to get to the steps, where I saw another kid sort of holding onto the banister, stumbling backwards, and I caught him in my arms. Looked over his shoulder, and I saw his white T-shirt just filling with red blood. And I remember putting him down on the ground, screaming at people to call an ambulance, and blood just seemed to be coming from everywhere.

I found out his name. His name was Wazin. I threw my hands into his bloody shirt, having no medical training whatsoever, just trying to stop the blood.

It was like nothing you see on TV. There was no eloquence, about it. It was just, messy and disgusting.

Blood, foamy blood was pouring from his mouth. I stuck my fingers in 'cause I heard him gagging, trying to clear his airway. And just, it was, it was, it was continuous.

It seemed like hours, until the ambulance finally arrived. By that time, his body was lifeless. I was pushed out of the way.

They ripped open his T-shirt, and he had three bullet holes in the front of his chest and one on his side. And I remember, getting up off the grass where I was just sitting, watching the emergency personnel try to, save his life, and he was unfortunately, by that point, dead.

And walking over to my dad, who looked at me, covered in another boy's blood, and I just insisted that he went home. I stayed and talked to the police, and then I went home. I lived on the top floor of these projects.

And I walk up the steps, 16 flights, get to the door, my dad opens the door, and we have this moment where we're just staring at each other.

Now, my dad is a guy who says, all the time that he is the result of a grand conspiracy of love, and that thus and therefore you are, son, not only born in a grand from a grand conspiracy of love, but you were born on third base. And don't ever think you hit a triple.

Your father was your father was, born to a single mother, born poor. In fact, he'll get upset at me he me hearing me call him born poor. He said, "Poor? I was just po'.

P-O. I couldn't afford the other two letters." And he was born in a, in a, in a viciously segregated town in the mountains of North Carolina. He was, born to where his mother couldn't take care of him.

He was raised by his grandmother. Eleven percent of my kids in my city, around that, are raised by their grandparents. His grandmother couldn't take care of him, and then he was taken in by the community.

And it was the community that intervened with him, that conspired, to make sure he got on the right track in school. When he couldn't afford to go to college and said he was gonna put it off to work, they said, "You'll never go to college."

So they. He tells me this story about getting dollar envelopes filled with dollar bills so that he could pay his first semester's tuition, get a job at North Carolina Central University, a small Black, historically Black college in North Carolina. And then his life then became a story of interventions. He was able to graduate.

Got his first job thanks to Blacks and whites coming together through the Urban League, helping companies hire Blacks for the first time. Interventions. He then moved into the first house that I grew up on because of an organization called the Fair Housing Council. Blacks and whites coming together, sent out a white test couple who worked with my parents to break open a town that I grew up in.

As my father called when we moved in there, he called us the four raisins in a tub of vanilla ice cream. But my dad would sit me at my kitchen table and tell me these stories over and over again of this amazing conspiracy of love that got us to where we are.

And so now I'm sitting in this, in this doorway with my dad staring at me with a boy's blood on my, on myself. And I sort of pushed past him and said, "Dad, I just wanna go to the bathroom."

And I walked in, and I closed the door on my father, my history, my rock, and I stared at myself in the mirror, and I began to try to scrub this boy's blood off my hands. And I am a guy that suffers from a severe case of BO. Don't worry about it.

People are moving their chairs back. Bold optimism. And but at this point, I'm staring in the mirror, and my hands are shaking, and I. The blood's off my hands, but I keep scrubbing 'cause I just feel the blood on my hands.

And I felt myself becoming choked with an anger that just, is rare to my being. And I felt angry at this nation that professes, where children sing a chorus to our country every day that we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, but yet there's such a dramatic difference between the experiences of some children and others.

And how could everybody in this room know who I'm talking about when I say Natalie Holloway or JonBenét Ramsey, but not one person in this room can name a kid that was shot this year in an inner city, and there were thousands? I became frustrated with who we claim to be, but the savage realities of who we are.

And then I walk out, and I look at my father, who says to me, "Son, I worry about our nation, what battles we have fought, my generation and the generation before me, how we emboldened this democracy, how we made it more real and made it more true.

But now I worry that a boy born to a single mother in a poor neighborhood, in a segregated neighborhood, who couldn't be raised by his mother, was taken in by others, that was born under those circumstances in 1936- has a better life chance to make it than a child born under the same circumstances, in 19 in 2006 or 2010.

And my father, when he said that to me, I felt like he was indicting my generation, this generation of astounding achievement, this generation of incredible advancement and access. And he was standing there looking at me, his son who was so shaken, and he this optimistic man who believes deeply in this country and this nation, as he calls it, a conspiracy of love, how he could there suddenly be doubtful.

And I left that apartment the next morning, and I walked down the stairs, and I slammed into, the presence of a woman named Miss Virginia Jones. And she is, the was the tenant president of those buildings and had been the tenant president since the day they were built. She was an elderly woman.

She was about five foot and a smidgen, but I look up to her. And I didn't even have to have a conversation with her. I saw the back of her head, and my funk just disappeared, and I suddenly felt this sense of hope and excitement again.

And the funk disappeared because I interviewed her, a f-a few years earlier for, a article I was writing, a couple years earlier for an article I was writing for Esquire, and I told them I wanted to write about American heroes, and I picked a woman that nobody really knew about.

And in the course of interviewing this tenant president, this fearsome woman who had done so much for me personally, in fact, on my first day meeting her, I was still a Yale Law student, she brought me into the middle of Martin Luther King Boulevard and said to me, "You wanna help me?" I was a law student. I said, "Yes, ma'am, I want to help you.

I'm Cory Booker. I'm from Yale Law School." And she said, "Okay. Well, if you want to help me, look around you.

What do you see?" And I described a crack house, graffiti, all the problems. And then she just looked at me, and she said, "You can never help me."

And I said, "What are you talking about?" And she looked at me hard, and she said, "Boy, you need to understand something, that the world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you. And if you're one of those people who only sees problems and darkness and despair, that's all it's ever gonna be.

But if you're one of those people who stubbornly, every time you open your eyes, you see hope, you see opportunity, you see possibilities, you see love, you see the face of God, then you can possibly help me." And I remember her, she walked away, and on that first moment of meeting her, I looked at my shoes and said, "Okay, grasshopper, thus endeth the lesson."

And so when I walked out from that building, the story I remembered was her telling me when I was interviewing her about her son who fought for the US, military, who came back to this country and was visiting his mother. His mother got a door knock on the door, Ms. Jones did, and woman couldn't speak.

She was crying. She gr-got grabbed by, the woman, dragged down five flights of stairs, and there was her son, shot to death in the lobby, bleeding it red. And she told me she fell to her knees and wailed into the, in, into the echoes of the lobby.

And I looked at her when she finished that story, and this is what I was remembering as I came out of the building, and I said, "Ms. Jones, I know where you work." She and I she worked for the prosecutors. She and I paid market rent to live in these buildings.

And I said, "I s-I don't understand." I said, "Why do you still live here where you have to walk through the lobby of the building where your child was murdered?" And she looked at me almost like she was insulted by the question.

She said, "Why do I still live here?" And I said, "Yes," I said, "Yeah." And she goes, "Why am I still in apartment five A?"

"Yes, Ms. Jones. Why?" And she goes, "Why am I still the tenant president from the day these buildings were built forty years ago?" And I said, "Yes, Ms. Jones.

Why?" And she stuffed out her chest, and she said, "Because I'm in charge of homeland security." Now to me, this is what keeps me fired up in Newark, is that I live in a city with the most stubbornly hopeful, the most audaciously determined individuals who have not given up on the truth of the American dream and confront in every moment the unfulfilled, unfinished dream.

And there are people that realize in an intellectual and spiritual way that if we who are on the front lines of this fight for America can't solve this problem, the country as a whole will suffer. As Langston Hughes said, "There is a dream in this land with its back against the wall. To save the dream for one, we must save it for all."

And what gives me hope is after five years in a job that people told me that would ground down my idealism, which would squeeze out my optimism and my hope, which would make an idealist a realist, I'm telling you that I am hope unhinged.

Because I see the national problems that we have every day when I leave my apartment in Newark, New Jersey, and I see how they are a cancer on the soul of this country and our economy.

But I also see Newark, New Jersey, like so many other cities, are littered with examples, are littered with models that demonstrate to us that there is a way out, and in fact, that our challenges do not reflect a lack of capacity to deal with them, but they they reflect a lack of collective will. And this is what has me both so fired up and angry, but also incredibly hopeful and full of love.

Let me deal with two complex problems, and I love talking about these problems to people of any political persuasion, because whether you are somebody who hates big government or believes in government, you have to join with me in saying that perhaps some of the greatest waste in America right now is the fact that we're investing in systems that produce such abhorrent failure.

The criminal justice system is one of those systems that we spend billions of dollars, billions of dollars annually in a correctional system in New Jersey, for example, that does nothing to correct the problems. The other system is this system of public education that right now is failing to prepare the majority of our children for a twenty-first century economy that is a knowledge-based economy.

The more you The more you earn, and forget about earn, the more you contribute, the more you grow. Now, the criminal justice system, actually, my team said, "This is crazy." We. My friend Michael Bloomberg says this all the time.

We're unconscious to the fact that every day we have a Virginia Tech in America. Every single day. There are 30-plus people murdered in our city, countless more that are shot. And I always joke with my friends, I said, "You know, the, you know, guys who get shot don't show up to the hospital with health insurance."

In fact, we found out that the victims of shootings in our city, about 80-something percent, 83 or 84% of them, have been arrested before, and the average arrests are 10 times that they have been engaged in the criminal justice system as adults, not to mention their child arrests.

We couldn't believe it when we started seeing this pattern that we have in America of criminality that becomes ingrained, in fact, generationally ingrained, because the children most likely to go to prison in America are children of incarcerated adults.

And so we started looking at this system and saying, "Why are we engaged in this ridiculous game that we believe that somehow there's some correlation between the more arrests we do and the lower crime there'll be?" There's no correlation whatsoever. And that my police officers, one of whom was here, sitting over there on the side, yes, he has his gun with him.

Jim Steyer, behave yourself or we're coming after you. My police officers could drive by corners and name the guys there. And when we would get out in the corners and I would engage the fellas, the fellas would know who the police officers are.

And so we started saying that there has to be the ability for Americans to innovate a way out of this. There's gotta be a way to create radical shifts in realities. And we said let's start experimenting with system change to demonstrate in a policy way that we have choices in America to make.

And so we started looking around, well, who is doing something to end this nightmare that when a person is arrested that they won't leave a system with 60-plus, 60 to 70-plus coming right back? And so we started trying to find new ways. We looked at programs all around the country.

First of all, we found out when we interviewed guys that they come out and they all express a desire to do the right thing. One of my friends who's very involved in the criminal justice system, guys on the street says, "Look, 5% are knuckleheads." You can go to any profession from politicians to you name it.

5% of us are maybe knuckleheads and belong under a prison, but 95% actually are far more rational economic actors than you think. And so a guy coming out of prison who can't get a driver's license, they know who they are to arrest him, but he can't. Comes out and doesn't have identification, it's an amazing struggle.

Can't. Doesn't wanna go see the mother of their children because they owe them so much money in child support payments, has warrants out for their arrest 'cause in prison they had a traffic ticket become a failure to appear, the failure to pay, failure to appear, then a warrant. All of these administrative law problems, we start listening to them and said, "Okay, let's innovate."

We found out that there was no legal support for these guys, so we pulled all of our law firms in Newark together to create the nation's first pro bono legal service project, and we said to the law firms, "Help us stop crime. A little bit of administrative law help could help these guys." And it was amazing.

The law firms found that their associates were loving it because they liberated the economic potential of guys, helping them expunge records, get driver's license and ID. We said, "Well, look at these guys. They're coming out and they need rapid attachment to work.

This is a bad economy, but let's find out ways to get them attached to work." And we've done everything in Newark from partnering with the Doe Fund to start businesses that fill a niche in our city. We found out that we didn't have any fumigation businesses built in, based in Newark, so we started a fumigation company solely for the purpose of hiring guys when they come home.

It's called Pest at Rest. I did not think of the name. We realized guys. There's gotta be a better marketer in this room, please.

It sounds like a spa for bugs. We found out that guys coming home, that one of the biggest things they said they wanted to be, imagine this, was great fathers, but yet they were often absentee fathers. And you talk to them about why that was, and there were logical reasons that they had for not being involved in their kids' lives.

So we created a partnership program with these guys where we brought in other men to be mentors to the, to the guys, fathers being mentors to other fathers. We actually created a fraternity of men around it. I wasn't in a fraternity at Stanford, but I wanted to create one, so we created Delta Alpha Delta Sigma, DADS.

And we had parenting classes, because I learned how to be a dad even though my parents are saying, "Why aren't you one?" I learned how to be a dad because, you know, 5:00 in the morning when I was in first grade, the first sound I would hear on a snow day would be my dad shoveling the driveway, 'cause he was gonna get to work, snowstorm or not.

So we started getting parenting classes, group activities for the women. We actually sat the women down and helped the men negotiate child support payments, took care of everything, and before you knew it, we had this program that now over five years has a recidivism rate, not where New Jersey's is, about 65%, it has a recidivism rate lower than 3%. We have a program now at a one-stop center partially funded by the Manhattan Institute.

I've got a right-leaning think tank in New York partnering with grassroots activists who can't even say the word Republican without gagging. Repub-bleh. Repub-bleh. But partnering in Newark City Hall with a program right now that for the men that come to our men and women that come to our program, we have a 70% placement rate for jobs working with local companies.

That one small aspect of our program has saved the state of New Jersey millions of dollars. We are Americans. There is nothing we can't do, but we allow ourselves to get caught in the grooves of a record playing the same old tired song over and over again, surrendering our power, surrendering our authority, surrendering our responsibility.

In fact, we get into a state of what I call sedentary agitation, where when we see the kids shot on TV in the inner city, we're upset about it. But we take no responsibility for it. We don't get up and do something about it.

We fail to see that our destiny is fully linked up with the destiny of another American, and I know it is. Go to Google and put in the words McKinsey disparity education. A report will pop up, a 2009 McKinsey report, where they looked at the impact in America of the disparities of educational outcomes alone.

They said the impact on GDP alone is about one point three to two point three trillion dollars. Trillion dollars. You see, something I know is that genius is equally distributed in America, equally distributed. You'll find it everywhere from inner cities to suburbs, from farm areas, and that our greatest natural resource as a nation is the minds of our children.

But yet we throw them away in a more of a gross offensive way than the oil spill in the Gulf. And the reason why I get excited about this problem is because we've shown ways of solving it. I could take you to Newark, New Jersey right now and show you schools in my city that are outperforming the wealthiest suburbs.

The answers are there. The question is do we have the will? I talked to the Ford Foundation, and they're like, "We've spent lots of money in investment, but we know some of the things that actually work.

We're doing them in Newark now." Some of our schools just take simple equations. Like when I was going to school, time was the constant, achievement was the variable.

You go to school a hundred eighty days in New Jersey. If there's a snow day, they're gonna smack another one on, even if we were, like I was in Harrington Park Elementary in New Jersey, sitting in the cafeteria watching reruns of The Little Rascals. You're gonna be in that building a hundred eighty days.

Look at contracts for teachers and principals, it's all about time. Well, my highest performing schools in Newark have switched that equation around and said that achievement is gonna be the constant, time is gonna be the variable. They go to school longer school days, longer school weeks.

We have Saturday classes, mandatory Saturday classes, longer school years. And funny enough, that's what our competitor nations are doing. The answers are out there.

Whether in reforming our criminal justice system, I can tell you from all over our country, incredible things and innovations are are going on. In education, we see things that are working, but we are lacking the political will, the collective will, the individual will. I'm a mayor of a big city.

I've got a lot of things to do, but I say it all the time. If every American who was able just mentored a kid, you could actually do online mentoring now. All mentoring, I've seen study after study shows you drive down the level of criminal activity, you drive down the level of early sex practices, you drive up the success of schools.

But yet we as Americans, who drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that we did not dig, we lavishly from banquet tables that were prepared for us by our ancestors. We're too often just sitting around getting drunk on the sacrifice and struggle of other people's labors and forgetting that we're a part of a noble mission in humanity.

The first nation formed not as a, as a, as a, as a monarchy, not as a theocracy, but as an experiment, an ideal that a diverse group of people, that when we come together, E pluribus unum, that if we join together, that we can make a greater whole out of the sum of our parts. And so here we are, standing at a crossroads in our country.

We are cannibalizing ourselves by segregating our populations, poor and not poor, educational access and lack thereof, high crime areas, spending more and more money in finding ways to liberate people from these dead ends of life, from the carnage of human potential. And to me, it is a choice, just like every moment of our life is. We either choose to accept conditions as they are or take responsibility for changing them.

Well, I know what our history is. I know what the calling of our ancestors is.

And so I'll end, and I'm looking forward to our panel, with a poem that I've begun to say more and more that my parents would read to me as a child, as they would tell me the stories of how lucky I was to be born where I was, how lucky I was to have the opportunities I have, how the experience that I was having as a young Black man in America was a dangerous dream to my grandparents when they were growing up.

Our parents read me this poem from Langston Hughes that says, "O let America be America again— the land that never has been yet but yet must be— the land where everyone is free, the poor man, the Indian, the Negro, me. Who made America? Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, must make our mighty dream live again?

Oh, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, but I swear this oath— America will be." Our generation must say collectively, "Not on our watch. This will not be the generation with more people in poverty than our parents.

This will not be the generation with lower literacy rates than our parents. This will not be the generation where our economy declines in comparison to the rest of the world." We know we have the capacity, but as our leaders have said, there can be no progress without struggle.

As King said, "Change will not roll in on the wheels of inevitability. It must be carried in by patriots and soldiers for truth and justice," and I say the American way. Thank you.