By Jean Nash Wells

I first interviewed Cory Booker in 2002 during his first run for Mayor of Newark. Booker lost that race to incumbent Mayor Sharpe James by just a few thousand votes. It’s four years later and Booker is on the stump again and from all appearances, this time he’ll be victorious.

After five terms (totaling 20 years) Sharpe James will not seek a sixth term as Mayor. There are three others competing against Booker State Senator Ron Rice, David Blount and Nancy Rosenstock. They have slim odds of coming even close to Booker in the May 9 election. Polls indicate a margin of more than 50 points in Booker’s favor over Rice.

In the years since the last election, Booker has built a coalition of support through the non-profit organization he started, Newark Now. With its mission to empower and equip Newark residents with the tools and resources to transform their communities through neighborhood based associations and tenant organizations, he has gained much needed grass roots credibility. He has been out in the community meeting people, shaking as many hands as possible and speaking out about issues he thought were important.

At 36, Cory Booker was born in the same year that his would be predecessor, Sharpe James entered politics and won his first election as a Newark City Councilman. Booker represents the new generation of leadership born in the post-Civil Rights era. He is supremely well educated, thoughtful, charming, tall and good-looking. By virtue of his bid for mayor against a giant in 2002 and his formidable showing in that race, he has earned his stripes as a political force to be reckoned with.

It was time to talk with him again. We met in the Booker Team’s North Ward headquarters on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark, a heavily Hispanic and Italian section of the city. He was wrapping up an interview with a reporter from a local Latino newspaper-in Spanish.

How has he changed since 2002? Looking a bit more mature, Cory spoke from a seemingly more introspective place and sounded what could even be called prophetic. The four years were reaffirming he said. After the election many people had come to him with offers to do other things, but though in some ways it might have been easier to pursue them, he kept his resolve to stay on course and not be deterred from his goal.

“I think your greatest dreams for yourself are really whispers from angels,” he said, “and you’ve got to stay faithful to them.” Many of the ideas that he has formulated over the four years have been “forged under fire,” as opposed to in the past when his ideas were formed in a life that had been achievement after achievement, rather than so-called failure. The achievements he refers to are many: high school football star, athletic scholarship to Stanford University, Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law Degree, election to Newark City Council, running for mayor of New Jersey’s largest city and attracting national attention as a golden boy with everything going his way.

“I don’t consider that race a failure,” he said. “It has become one of my greatest life lessons – not to give up on your principles and ideas. I believe that the biggest obstacles can often lead to the greatest opportunities. “

How has Newark changed? “I talk about this city being called ‘Brick City” because of the architecture. I like to believe it’s because of the people. Like bricks, we’re strong, we’re resilient, and we’re enduring. And what’s more important is that when we come together we can create. I see that within my community. I’m inspired by some very heroic individuals, who will never get name recognition, never see their names in the paper, but nevertheless are the fabric of the community and are just looking for a government that will help them. Leadership is not about being a light in the darkness and leading people along the way. It’s really about having people discover their own light and their own power.”

The conversation moved into the realm of culture. “I do believe we are in a cultural crises,” he said. Booker says that the changes that will come about in Newark are not simply because of a new mayor. “If people think that just by pulling a different lever, the changes will come about, they’re wrong,” he said. He described a meeting with members of the clergy to whom he indicated that he would be asking for more from them than any mayor ever has. He went on to say that in addition to whatever policy changes are made, what is necessary is a spiritual effort that must be led by church members. They will speak out about what is acceptable and they must do it with a sense of urgency that doesn’t exist now.

“For example, if you look at education the average Black high school senior reads at the same grade level as the white eighth grader. So the urgency today is as great as it was a generation ago when we were fighting for school desegregation,” he continued, talking at breakneck speed in an effort to get all of what was on his mind into the interview. “Two generations ago a white power structure was literally murdering Blacks, shooting Blacks – James Meredith, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King. But now you are many, many times more likely, if you are an African American, to be killed by somebody Black, than by someone white. Generations ago we had a situation where Blacks were being killed by disease, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Now AIDS is being spread Black person to Black person. Six generations they were holding Blacks in shackles and bondage. Now Black men are being held in shackles in prison at rates that are alarmingly high. Politics are part of the solution, but it’s not the complete solution we need as a community. We have some serious comeuppance and the way you deal with that, I think, is by really making it a spiritual calling -individuals living consistently with their values,” he concluded.

What about the music that our young people embrace today? “We should speak out against it, but we should examine the root causes of the embrace of that sub-culture and deal there first,” was his response. “A lot of it has to do with how we view ourselves, the sense of self-esteem we have. To degrade yourself or someone you love is an anathema to your very being if you are overflowing with love. So we have to begin to be affirming the dignity and humanity of our children in their earlier years, and the role models they have are not doing that. They’re negative.”

Illustrative of that, Cory talked about meeting with a group of young gangbangers– 13 and 14 year-old members of the Bloods. What startled him and the other people there was that though these young people were participating in a culture that leads to death, they were innocent, and wide-eyed with a narrow view of the world and humble ambitions. “They had an inability to see hope,” he said, “to know the things that kept me going as a child. Believing that this world is so big and that I can play a major role in it ─ believing that I am a person of destiny. Those were the signals my parents sent me and they were self-fulfilling prophecies; that I was special, that I not only deserved a life of greatness, but it was my divine calling to be that way.”

I sum it up this way. Cory Booker is man of intellect and insight, grounded in a philosophy – a cultural, political and economic philosophy that applies to the times. We must make way for new leadership. This man who would be mayor should be given the opportunity to apply his ideas and ideals and to put into place the pragmatic solutions he has for the problems that face Newark today.

Cory Booker doesn’t need Newark. Newark needs Cory Booker.