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The son of civil rights activists, Cary and Carolyn Booker, who were among the first African-American executives at IBM, Booker was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the predominantly white, affluent town of Harrington Park in Bergen County, New Jersey.[1] He is an alumnus of Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan.[2] Booker traveled west to study at Stanford University, where he earned a B.A. in political science in 1991 and an M.A. in sociology the following year. He played varsity football — he made the All–Pacific Ten Academic team; — and was elected to the council of (four) presidents. While he was there, he ran The Bridge, a student-run crisis hotline and organized help for youth in East Palo Alto from Stanford students.[3]

He won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he was awarded an honors degree in modern history in 1994. At Oxford, he became friends with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. He became the President of the L'Chaim Society, a Jewish group founded by Boteach, to signify his commitment to end tensions between Jews and African Americans.

After Oxford, he obtained a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997 and, while there, started and operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven. He was also a Big Brother, and was active in the Black Law Students Association. After law school, Booker returned to New Jersey. He served as Staff Attorney for the Urban Justice Center in New York and Program Coordinator of the Newark Youth Project.

From 1998 to 2006, he lived in Brick Towers, a notorious public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. Booker organized tenants there to fight for improved conditions. In November 2006, Booker left his apartment for the top unit in a three-story rental on Hawthorne Avenue on Newark's south side, an area described as "a drug- and gang-plagued neighborhood of boarded-up houses and empty lots."[4]