NOT knowing his place has led Cory Booker to success all his life. Breaking barriers of race, class, ideology and age helps explain why, as a first-term senator from New Jersey, he is more famous than colleagues 20 years his senior, and appears on lists of possible vice-presidential running mates for Hillary Clinton.
Early in his career the habit almost got Mr Booker shot, he recalls in a new book, “United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good”. A young graduate of Stanford, Oxford, and Yale Law School, eager to offer legal help to a troubled neighbourhood, he moved into a crime-blighted housing complex in Newark, New Jersey. Especially after he was elected to the city council, his presence was deemed bad for business by local drug dealers. They debated scaring him away with violence, an ex-gang boss told Mr Booker later—adding soothingly: “They were just going to shoot you in the leg.”
Other moments of boundary-crossing were happier. Just before he was born in 1969 civil-rights lawyers helped his parents, both pioneering black executives with IBM, overcome invisible (and by then illegal) racial barriers to...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/28SnS5A
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