America’s Second Founding—Charles Sumner, the Civil War, and Reconstruction (new date)

The Supreme Court has described Reconstruction as America’s “Second
Founding.” But who were the Second Founders? In this year’s annual Battisti
Lecture, biographer and legal scholar Zaakir Tameez discusses the life and
legacy of one Second Founder: Charles Sumner, the abolitionist statesman
best known for being beaten nearly to death 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 of
his time—a man whom W.E.B. DuBois described as America’s “seer of
democracy.”
In this lecture, Tameez will present Sumner as a constitutional visionary who
helped to devise the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment,
the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. He will discuss
Sumner’s early legal career, including his attempt to integrate Boston public
schools in 1849 alongside a Black lawyer as part of the nation’s first
interracial legal team. And he will highlight Sumner’s late-in-life role in helping to
create the Howard Law School and train the nation’s first generation of civil
rights lawyers, including some of the founders of the NAACP.

Speaker’s Bio:
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 in
Houston, Texas, he now practices commercial litigation in New York City.

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