PeterS

My father was born in the small, segregated
mountain town of Hendersonville, North Carolina, in 1936. Less than 100 years before his birth, ens***ed b***k A******ns were building Hendersonville’s Main Street.

The son of a single mother, my dad grew up in poverty. When his mother became too ill to raise him, his grandmother stepped in until she too was no longer able to care for him, and then a local family took him in as their own.

With no source of financial support and no tradition of college in his family, my dad never considered going to college. But members of the local community, recognizing his potential, encouraged him to go. His church even sent around a collection plate to help pay his first semester’s tuition at North Carolina Central University.

Part-time jobs enabled him to work his way through school. When he graduated, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he was soon hired by IBM, becoming the company’s first black salesman in the Northern Virginia area. Before long, IBM identified my dad as one of its highest achieving salespeople globally, and promoted him to a job in its offices in New York.

Cary, Cary Sr., Cory, and Carolyn. Booker Family photo
When he and my mom were looking to move to the New York City suburbs, real estate agents’ illegal racial steering policies nearly kept them from buying the house they wanted in an all-white neighborhood in New Jersey. It took a sting operation coordinated by the local Fair Housing Council, in which a white couple posed as my parents, to help break the persistent segregation in the town where I would eventually grow up.

For my dad the road to success was anything but easy. But by the time I was born, he had moved his family from poverty to the middle class within the span of a single generation.

The broken bargain
My dad, who died in 2013 just six days before I was elected to the United States Senate, was kind, funny, and creative. He was also talented, hardworking, and intelligent. He achieved so much because of who he was. But he made it clear to me that he was only as successful as he was because of all the help he received along the way—from the family who took him in, to the folks in his church who insisted that he go to college and helped him do so, to the activists from the Fair Housing Council who fought for him. At a time when corporate America was even more homogenous than it is today, his ability to get his foot in the door as a black man at IBM was made possible by the fact that the local Urban League, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., and others helped him, championed him, and opened that door for him.

My dad’s life was an exceptional testimony to the way the bargain—that if you work hard, sacrifice, and struggle, you can make it—should work. But he knew his experience was just that—exceptional—and he was anguished by our country’s inability to extend the bargain he believed in to all of her people.

For my dad the road to success was anything but easy. But by the time I was born, he had moved his family from poverty to the middle class within the span of a single generation.
In the years before he passed away, my dad expressed concern to me that the bargain that had worked for him, the one he believed in, wasn’t becoming more real for more Americans, but instead moving further and further away.

In many ways, my dad was right. For millions of Americans—white and black, men and women, Latino and Asian, straight and L***Q, people from every walk of life and every religion—the barriers to opportunity and success are higher than ever.

The bargain—the one my dad and millions of other hardworking Americans made with America and that America kept with them—is broken.

A 50-50 shot
Newark, New Jersey, has been my home for more than two decades. For over seven of those years, I served as the city’s mayor.

When I was elected in 2006, my team and I were determined to make our city safer, more prosperous, and more successful than ever before. We prioritized public safety, and put reducing crime and violence at the center of our efforts. In 2008, our city went 43 days without a murder, the longest streak in 48 years. Four years into my administration in 2010, the city of Newark had its first calendar month without a murder since 1966.

We worked to jumpstart Newark’s economy. Billions of dollars in new investments came into Newark, and these projects created jobs for local residents. For the first time in 50 years new residential high-rises broke ground downtown, for the first time in 40 years a new hotel opened in our city’s downtown, and for the first time in 20 years the city had new office towers and major supermarkets being built. By the 2010 Census, Newark’s population had grown instead of shrunk for the first time in 60 years.

https://www.brookings.edu/essay/senator-booker-american-dream-deferred/?utm_source=FB&utm_medium=BPIAds&utm_campaign=TBEBooker&utm_term=NoNoCtyUS-18^65-NoListBrookings%20SubscnoBHV&utm_content=156508038

roy

Very good story,wonder how many on the right will read this.

bahmer

I read it so. What am I supposed to do now. Good story. If you work hard and follow the rules you can succeed and that is what Trump is trying to establish for all. For Hispanic and Black as well as Asian and Indian. Buy the way that is the conservative way to do it not the liberal. It is also called capitalism which may shock you.

Mike Easterday

So a black guy plays the race card to be mayor.