Overview

Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman 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 adviser 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 argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders. An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.

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Zaakir Tameez is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia, he is a Fulbright Scholar and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow from Houston, Texas. David Lee Garver (SAG-AFTRA/AEA) is an audiobook narrator, an award-winning actor, and a lifelong musician. He started performing at an early age in children's and community theaters in the Midwest before embarking on a professional career in film, television, and stage. He brings decades of performance experience into the booth, and feels fortunate every day to work in a medium that marries all of his skills. His voice has a gritty yet warm quality, and is uniquely suited to a variety of books and characters. Some of his favorite genres include true crime, legal drama, mystery, romance, and especially music biography.

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