Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

Author Talk with Zaakir Tameez

Zaakir Tameez examines Sumner’s legacy and his role in guiding the nation from slavery to freedom while advancing citizenship, voting rights, and equal protection during Reconstruction.

Join us to explore the life and legacy of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the Civil War and Reconstruction with biographer Zaakir Tameez. Charles Sumner is known as the abolitionist stateman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an advisor to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

In a comprehensive narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America’s forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He explores Sumner’s critical partnerships with the nation’s first generation of Black lawyers and civil right leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long. Through historical and constitutional scholarship, Zaakir brings back to life Charles Sumner, one of America’s most inspiring statesmen.  His formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still today.

Zaakir Tameez is a scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia, he clerked for Judge Jill Pryor on the Eleventh Circuit. His book, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, was the winner of the 2026 Cooley Prize, an annual award for the best book on constitutional law given by the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, he now practices commercial litigation in New York City.

Light refreshments will be served.

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