Rutgers-Newark College Democrats President Assatta Mann endorsed ‘People For Progress’ founder and Senate primary candidate Lawrence Hamm over incumbent Senator Booker.

Mann, who’s also an intern and aide with Assemblyman Benjie Wimberly and chair of the College Democrats of NJ Black Caucus, posted on Facebook that ‘proud to stand with Lawrence Hamm — the next U.S. Senator from New Jersey. It’s time to move on from Wall Street loyalists, and get behind the people’s movement’.

Hamm, one of the co-chairs of Senator Bernie Sanders’ state campaign, is challenging Booker in the June primary.

This from the Insider NJ piece ‘A ‘Common Hoodlum’s’ Coming of Age: the U.S. Senate Candidacy of Larry Hamm‘ at the end of December:

The tug of war for the soul of Lawrence “Larry” Hamm between government and activism, pragmatism and

radicalism played out in his hometown of Newark, the cultural and political connecting point, where for years activism alone appeared to have the decided upper-hand; that is until now, as he undertakes a street-level statewide run for elected office, 45 years after his power-defying bid for an at-large city council seat.

His direct challenge of U.S. Senator Cory Booker carries multiple layers of dramatic resonance, overlapping storylines and even inevitability. Both born in Washington, D.C., they came to New Jersey as babies, 16 years apart, Booker the son of IBM executives to Harrington Park; and Hamm the son of a truck driving father and seamstress mother to the Central Ward of Newark. They both attended ivy league colleges, Booker Yale and Hamm Princeton, and both saw Newark as the proving ground. But while Booker spent a brief time as a tent-pitching protester before winning his first city council seat in 1998 and thereafter leaping upward from one elected office to the next (councilman, mayor, senator, and now, he hopes, president); Hamm lost his 1974 citywide shot and then, in the early 1980’s, founded the social and economic justice-agitating grassroots outfit, the People’s Organization for Progress (POP).