John, on July 1, 1998, my life changed forever.

That was the day that I was sworn in to the Municipal Council of Newark, New Jersey. Newark’s Central Ward elected me to represent them, defeating a four-term incumbent on the Municipal Council.

It wouldn’t be the last time I took on the party machine to respond to the needs of our residents.

In 1999, as a new member of the council, I went on a 10-day hunger strike and spent five months in a motorhome to call attention to the lack of resources our Municipal Council was investing in treatment for drug addiction and reducing gun violence around public housing.

Machine politicians on the Municipal Council regularly voted down my proposals for housing and public safety. So I ran for mayor.

After coming up short against a 16-year incumbent and the entire Newark political machine in 2002, portrayed in the documentary film Street Fight, I ran again in 2006 and won.

I still keep a map of Newark’s Central Ward in my Senate office in Washington. The 15 years that I spent in Newark government taught me so much. That experience has continued to inform my last decade of work in the Senate. 

Newark and the nation need safe, affordable housing.

Newark and the nation need solutions for gun violence.

Newark and the nation need a path forward to end the destructive War on Drugs.

These are the problems I’m committed to solving. I’ve been working to solve them for the last two-plus decades. And I’ll spend two decades more if that’s what it takes.

I am forever grateful to the hundreds of Central Ward residents who knocked on thousands of doors with me in that first election. But even then, one thing I could not have imagined when I started that first campaign for the Municipal Council in 1998 was having a grassroots team like this one all across the country that is so willing to help affect real change.

I can’t thank you enough for being a part of that, John, and I’m so grateful to have you here by my side.

If you share my commitment to solving the problems I set out to address when I won my first election, I’m humbly asking you to chip in $10 or whatever you can afford so we can continue to push for progress — together.

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Thanks so much for reading. I hope you learned something about me from reading this story — and why this work continues to matter so much to our future.

With love and gratitude, 

Cory

P.S. The week of this picture, the Tenant President of Brick Towers (a low-income housing complex that I later moved into, and now live down the street from where it once stood), Ms. Virginia Jones, didn’t want me to forget who elected me and who put me into office. She implored me, “Boy, don’t forget where you came from and who sent you.”

I still try to honor those words every day.