Newark Mayor to Address HLS

When Cory A. Booker took office as mayor of Newark, N.J. in 2006, he assumed responsibility for a city torn by crime, economic instability, and explosive racial tensions.

Booker, an Yale-educated lawyer, ran on platform of reforming the city’s government and reducing crime. Since taking office, his mayoral agenda—which some consider too idealistic for the harsh reality of Newark, which was decimated following notorious race riots in 1967 riots—has been closely monitored by his constituents and the national media alike.

This heavy dose of idealism is what the future lawyers who graduate from Harvard Law School may receive when Booker gives the Class Day speech tomorrow.

Just one year after graduating from Yale Law School in 1997, Booker moved into a $547 per month apartment in one of Newark’s worst public housing projects, a massive, mud-colored, 300-unit building that was demolished in December 2007.

Despite the fact that he is staking his political career on turning around the fortunes of a troubled city, Booker himself hails from a predominantly white, neighborhood in suburban Bergen County. His pedigree is glaringly elite: after graduating from Stanford, where he also took a master’s degree, Booker attended Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship before attending Yale for law school.

In 2002, Booker made his first run for mayor of Newark, losing narrowly to a veteran machine politician who painted Booker as a “carpetbagger.”

After briefly leaving politics to build a legal practice, Booker returned to Newark politics in 2006, winning the mayoral election by a landslide. His opponent from 2002, who served as mayor of Newark for two decades, was convicted of five counts of fraud in April from charges stemming from land deals he had made in office.

Booker’s place in the political spotlight is nearly as closely monitored as that of other Ivy-league educated, black politicians—namely Barack Obama, n Law School graduate who the mayor has vocally supported in the 2008 presidential campaign, and Deval L. Patrick ’78, another Law School graduate who is also the only black governor in the country.

Megan E. Ryan, one of four Class Marshals for the Law School’s class of 2008, said that Booker’s message would speak to students because “it was a chance to hear from someone who had given back to really needy communities.”

Ryan said that she and the other class Marshals were looking for a speaker who like Patrick, could speak to the use of a law degree in the public interest.

During his year and half in office, Booker has keep busy in his effort to curb Newark’s crime rate and establish his legacy and reputation as the city’s reformer.

His time as mayor has been met with some successes. Violent crime in Newark has declined for the first time since 2002, and the mayor continues to add new projects a growing list aimed at transforming the city.

Douglas H. Lasdon, Booker’s former supervisor at the Urban Justice Center said the he is confident in his ability to rise to the challenge that Newark represents.

“He’s got excellent judgement,” Lasdon said. “He’s made to be a politician in the most honorable sense of the word.”

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached adphill@fas.harvard.edu.