>>Cory Booker: I want to jump right in in
the short period of time I have because I'm
in this weird state in my life where I'm incredibly
excited. I literally get up every morning
with this amazing enthusiasm about what can
be but this very deep sober understanding
of what is.
I feel this amazing, awesome, sense of 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 want to 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 selected office.
It was 2004. It was April. My father was visiting
me for my birthday. And 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
poor census tracts in our city. I was living
in some high-rise public housing projects.
We were walking down the road. I will never
forget the gunshots that rang out sounded
like cannon fire because they echoed between
many of the buildings.
I turned around to see kids running down the
hill towards me screaming. I sprinted through
the children to get to the steps where I saw
another kid sort of holding onto the bannister,
stumbling backwards. And I caught him in my
arms. Looked over his shoulder and I saw his
white T-shirt filling with red blood.
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 Juazin.
I drew 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 was
pouring from his mouth. I stuck my fingers
in because I heard him gagging, trying to
clear his airway. 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.
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 insisted he went
home. I stayed and talked to the police.
I went home. I lived on the top floor of these
projects. I walked up the steps, 16 flights.
Get to the door. My dad opens the door.
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, thus -- and, therefore,
you are, son, not only born in a -- 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 born -- your father
was born to a single mother. Born poor. And,
in fact, he'll get upset with me if he hears
me call him born poor. "I was just po', p-o.
I couldn't afford the other two letters."
And he was born in a viciously segregated
town in the mountains in North Carolina. He
was born where his mother couldn't take care
of him. He was raised by his grandmother.
11% of kids in my city, or 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 go to college and said he was going
to put it off to work, they said, "You'll
never go to college." So he tells me this
story about getting envelopes full of dollar
bills so that he could pay his first semester's
tuition and get a job at North Carolina Central
University, a small 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 and helping companies hire blacks for
the first time. He then moved into the first
house that I grew up in 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 us when we moved in, he called us the
four raisins in the tub of vanilla ice cream.
But my dad would sit me at the kitchen table
and tell me these stories. And it was a conspiracy
of love that got us to where we are.
And so now I'm sitting in this doorway with
my dad staring at me with a boy's blood on
myself. And I sort of pushed past him and
said, "Dad, I just want to 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 began to try to
scrape 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 moving
their chairs back. Bold optimism. At this
point, I'm staring in the mirror, my hands
are shaking. The blood is off my hands. I
keep scrubbing because 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 there's such a dramatic between the
-- how could everybody in this room know who
I'm talking about when I say Natalie Holloway
or JonBenet Ramsey, but not one person in
this room could 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.
I 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,
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 in those circumstances in 1936
has a better life chance to make it than a
child born under the same circumstances in
2006 or 2010."
My father, 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 Ms. Virginia
Jones. And she is -- was the tenant president
of those buildings and had been 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 few years earlier for an 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 nobody heard about. In the
course of interviewing her, this fearsome
woman who had done so much 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 want to help me?"
I was lost, and I said, "Yes, ma'am."
And she said, "Okay. If you want to help me,
look around you. What do you see?"
And I described a crack house, graffiti, all
the problems.
Then she just looked at me and 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 there's
ever going to 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 probably help
me."
And I remember, she walked away on that first
moment of meeting her, I looked at my shoes,
I said, okay, grass hop per, thus endeth the
lesson. She was telling me about her son who
fought for the U.S. military, who came back
to this country and was visiting his mother,
his mother got a knock on the door, Ms. Jones
did, the woman couldn't speak, she was crying,
she 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. She told me she fell to her knees
and wailed into the echoes of the lobby. I
looked at her when she finished that story,
and I said, Ms. Jones, I know where you work.
She worked for the prosecutor's -- she and
I paid market rent to live in these -- these
buildings. And I said, "I just -- I don't
understand. 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?"
"Yes."
"Why am I still in apartment 5A?"
"Yes, Ms. Jones, why."
And she goes, "Why am I still the tenant president
from the day these buildings were built 40
years ago?"
And she stuffed out her chest and she said,
"Because I'm in charge of homeland security."
[ Laughter ]
>>Cory Booker: To me, this is what keeps my
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 which people told me would grind
down my idealism, which would squeeze out
my optimism, 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 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. 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 21st century
economy that is a knowledge-based economy.
The more you learn, 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. My friend, Michael
Bloomberg, says this all the time. We're unconscious
to the fact that every day, we are a Virginia
Tech in America. Every single day, there's
30 plus people murdered in our city, countless
more that are shot, every day. And I always
joke with my friends, I said, you know, guys
who get shot don't show up to the hospital
with health insurance. In fact, we found out
the victims of shootings in our city, about
83 or 84% of them have been arrested before.
And the average arrests are ten 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 who most likely
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's
no correlation whatsoever. And my police officers,
one of them was here, sitting over there on
the side -- yes, he has his gun with him.
[ Laughter ]
>>Cory Booker: Jim Stier (phonetic), 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 fellows, the fellows 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 got to be a way to
create radical shifts in realities.
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. 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 come
right back? 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, 5% are knuckleheads. You can go to any
profession, from politicians, to you name
it, 5% of us are knuckleheads and belong under
a prison. But 95% actually are far more rational
economic actors than you think. 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 comes out, doesn't have identification,
it's an amazing struggle, doesn't want to
go see the mother of their children because
they owe them so much money in child support
payments. Has warrants out for their arrest
because in prison they had a traffic ticket,
became a failure to pay, failure to appear,
with a warrant. All of these administrative
law problems, we start listening to them and
said, okay, let's innovate.
We found out there was no legal support for
these guys. So we pulled all 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 can
help these guys. It was amazing. The law firms
found that their associates were loving it,
because the liberated the economic potential
of guys, helping them expunge records, get
driver's licenses and IDs. We said, 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. We've done everything in Newark from
partnering with businesses to start a niche
in our city. We didn't have any fumigation
businesses based in Newark. We started one
solely for the purpose of hiring guys when
they come home. It's called Pest at Rest.
I did not think of the name.
[ Laughter ]
>>Cory Booker: We realize guys, there's got
to be a better marketer in this room, please.
It sounds like a spa for bugs.
[ Laughter ]
>>Cory Booker: 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 guys, fathers being mentors to other
fathers. We actually created a fraternity
of men around it. It wasn't in a fraternity
at Stanford, but I wanted to create one, so
we created Delta Alpha Delta Sigma, DADS.
[ Laughter ]
>>Cory Booker: And we had parenting classes.
I learned how to be a dad even though my parents
are saying, why aren't you one. I learned
how, because at 5:00 in the morning, when
I was in first grade, the first sound I would
hear on a snow day was my dad shoveling snow,
because he was going to get to work. We started
having group activities for the women, and
helped the men negotiated 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, a one-stop center,
partially funded by the Manhattan Institute.
I got a right-leaning think tank in New York,
partnering with grass-roots activists who
can't say the word Republican without gagging,
but partnering in Newark city hall with a
program right now that for the men that come
to our -- men and women who 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 we see the kids shot on TV and 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 say 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 1.3 to 2.3 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've rolled them away in more of
a gross offense 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, 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
a constant, achievement was the variable.
You go to school 180 days in New Jersey. If
there's a snow day, they're going to smack
another one on. Even if we were, like I was,
in Harrington Park Elementary, sitting in
the cafeteria watching reruns of The Little
Rascals. You're going to be in that building
180 days. Look at contracts for teachers and
principals, it's all about time. My highest-performing
schools in Newark have switched that equation
around and said that achievement is going
to be the constant; time is going to 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
in innovations 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 have got a lot of
things to do. But I see it all the time. If
every American who was able just mentored
a kid -- You can actually do online mentoring
now. All mentoring, I have 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 eat from banquet
tables that were prepared for us by our ancestors.
We are too often just sitting around getting
drunk on the sacrifice and struggle of other
people's labors and forgetting that we are
a part of a noble mission in humanity, the
first nation formed not as a monarchy, not
as a theocracy but as an experiment, an idea
that a diverse group of people, that when
we come together, e pluribus unum, that we
can make a greater whole out of the sum of
our parts.
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;
and 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
will 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 I was having as
a young Black man in America was a dangerous
dream to my grandparents when they were growing
up.
My parents read me this poem from Langston
Hughes: 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.
[ Applause ]
