10/15/2025
On behalf of the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, I invite you to a conversation I will have with Zaakir Tameez, the author of the highly acclaimed Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation. Tameez persuasively presents Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and courageous champion of emancipation, 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. Exploring Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked, Tameez shows how Sumner’s ideas and practice of constitutional politics resonate powerfully in our political time – when America is once again going through a foundational struggle over the meaning of the Constitution.
Zaakir Tameez is a scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia’s Program on Political and Social Thought, he is a Fulbright Scholar and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow.
Please join me in welcoming Tameez back to the University of Virginia on Thursday, October 16th, at 7 P.M. in Gibson Hall, Room 211.
Sid Milkis, Interim Director, Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy
