Mayor Cory Booker describes his “love affair” with Newark

High crime rate? Check. Grinding poverty? Check. These obstacles, however, haven't deterred Mayor Cory Booker from aspiring to remake Newark as a latter-day city upon a hill. He spoke of the challenges recently at Brown.
By TAB Staff  |  October 6, 2009  |  Email to a friend

Before giving his address at Brown, Booker sat down with Professor Marion Orr, director of the Taubman Center, and talked about the challenges and opportunities facing America’s cities.

Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, delivered the annual Noah Krieger Memorial Lecture sponsored by Brown’s Taubman Center for Public Policy on September 24.

A Rhodes Scholar and an alumnus of Stanford and Yale Law, Booker has been compared to Barack Obama as a “breakthrough leader”: “African-American politicians whose appeal transcends race,” said the New Yorker in a profile last year. In 2006, at the age of 37, he became mayor of the country’s third-oldest city and one of the worst-afflicted by poverty and crime. Newark’s political climate when Booker took office was described as among the most corrupt in urban America.

Booker quickly initiated a controversial, and highly successful, crackdown on major crime as a first step toward achieving his dream for the city’s rehabilitation. He promised to make Newark “a national standard of excellence” for urban transformation.

Speaking at the “First Draft of History” conference convened on October 1 and 2 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Brown President Ruth J. Simmons praised Booker as an exemplar of the broadly educated problem-solvers the United States increasingly needs. “As a university president, if I could produce one of him, that would be enough,” she said.