Community Read & Conversation - Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

Join retired Public Defender James Williams in conversation with Jack Boger (UNC Law, Professor Emeritus) and Ted Shaw (UNC Law, Distinguished Professor) about Zaakir Tameez's landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

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.

An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation 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.

This program presented in partnership with Chapel Hill Public Library's Community History Program and Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition.