On April 1, 2025, Cory Booker broke a record that stood for nearly 68 years. On the Senate floor, Booker spoke for a total of 25 hours and four minutes, starting the day before and speaking through the night into the following day. The previous record-holder, Strom Thurman, spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes. Booker not only beat the record by 46 minutes, he also washed a racist stain from America’s leader board.
The motivation behind Booker’s speech was two-fold. First, he wanted to express his thoughts regarding the current Trump administration and its drastic cuts of federal funding to several public agencies. Secondly, as a Black man, Booker wanted to beat Thurman’s record because of why Thurman spoke for so long in the first place.
Strom Thurmond established the record in 1957 as a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act. In terms of the Senate, a filibuster is an action, usually a speech or debate, meant to intentionally delay or prevent a vote on a bill. This essentially puts the entire Senate into a screeching halt since filibusters require more votes to stop than to actually pass a bill. Given that Thurmond was a champion for segregation and ally to the Ku Klux Klan, he spent over a day delaying the vote through his speech, but the bill passed two hours after he had stopped.
As a part of his 25+ hour long speech, Booker addressed both Thurmond and his record.
“The man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand. I’m not here, though, because of his speech,” said Booker. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
It was shortly after saying those words that it was confirmed that Booker broke the record.
“To be candid, Strom Thurmond’s record always kind of, just, just really irked me, that he would be the longest speech — that the longest speech, on our great Senate floor, was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate,” Booker said on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. “So to surpass that was something I didn’t know if we could do, but it was something that was really, once we got closer, became more and more important to me.”
Booker and his staff compiled 1,164 pages of material for this record-breaking speech, including letters from his constituents that he read aloud to the Senate. To prepare, he fasted and didn’t drink water for over a day before he started his speech so he wouldn’t have to stop and use the restroom. Unlike Thurmond, he never ate during his speech, only sipping from two glasses of water throughout the entirety of it. Unlike past marathon speakers, Booker kept on his message without resorting to reciting names from a telephone book or reading from Green Eggs & Ham. While he had to remain standing the entire time, Booker’s Democrat allies would ask him questions, allowing him to sip water and give his voice a small break.
Regardless of the results of Booker’s speech, he did accomplish an impressive feat that is recognized and outshines an unfortunate milestone in U.S. government history.
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