This past June, seeing a California Senator Alex Padilla getting pushed around and arrested after asking a question at a Department of Homeland Security press conference, I was reminded of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts Senator famous for taking a brutal beating on the Senate floor after calling for the abolition of slavery in 1856. I remembered that my friend Zaakir Tameez spent his last year of law school researching Sumner. Tameez’s research would culminate in a book, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, which reveals the roots of Sumner’s zealous pursuit of racial equality. It excavates a fully human Sumner, wrestling with class, race, and his own sexuality. Over the course of our conversation, Tameez impressed upon me the myriad lessons we can learn from Sumner’s legacy for the political landscape we are navigating today. He says, “What I wanted to do was tell a story about the agency of Sumner and other activists who grew up in a time in which America was a nation of white supremacy and domination, genocide and slavery, and [they] transformed it, even if briefly, into a true multiracial, egalitarian democracy... And if they could do it then, perhaps we can do it now.”
Earlier this summer, I talked to Zaakir over Zoom about his book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Yaseen: Can you walk me through how you got started writing this book?
Zaakir: I was taking a constitutional law class during my 2L year, where, as part of the course, I decided to read the brief that Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP filed in Brown v. Board of Education, because we all read the case, but very few people actually read the brief. In fact, I had to go and dig it up in Westlaw. As I'm reading this brief, which is around 250 pages, I find the name of Charles Sumner cited not once, not twice, but more than 40 times.
I had known a little bit about Charles Sumner. I knew he was a U.S. Senator. I knew he was an abolitionist. I knew he had been beaten by [Preston] Brooks almost to death on the Senate floor. What I did not know was that he was the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of the century, at least insofar as a white person could be.
What I discovered is that more than a hundred years before Brown, Sumner collaborated with a Black attorney, Robert Morris, to try to integrate the schools of Boston, and the arguments that they developed together, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP replicated almost point by point, citing him by name the whole way through.
I was just so struck by this story. I go back and look at the last major biography of Charles Sumner - it's two volumes by David Donald, nearly a thousand pages long. And yet there's only one paragraph about this groundbreaking case in the history of American law. So, I felt, there was a need for someone to write a new book and share more about that story.
Yaseen: One of the major contributions in the book, as far as I see, is that you contextualize his ideas within his childhood, growing up in a majority Black neighborhood in Boston. Can you paint that picture?
Zaakir: A lot of Bostonians assume when I say that Sumner grew up in a Black neighborhood that I'm going to be talking about Roxbury or something like that. Very few people would guess that Beacon Hill was actually the neighborhood where many Black Bostonians lived in the early 1820s.
When Sumner was born in the 1810s, he grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood because his father was too poor to afford living anywhere else. His father had these egalitarian impulses. When his father was younger, after graduating from Harvard, he was a sailor for a year, which was, I think, a common job for people who lacked money and who were young, athletic men - to go and sail the high seas for a year or two. On that trip, the boat stopped in Haiti.
He is there in the middle of the Haitian Revolution. The battles are ongoing as he's there in Haiti, and Sumner's father is invited to a dinner to celebrate the birthday of George Washington, which was organized by General Jean-Pierre Boyer, one of the leading Haitian revolutionaries. At this dinner, this young Charles Pinckney Sumner raises his glass and gives a toast to liberty, equality, and happiness for all men. General Boyer is so shocked by this white kid from North America that he invites him to sit next to him for the rest of the dinner.
As he's living in Beacon Hill, there's also all this activity among Black writers, musicians, craftsmen, and thinkers. Boston was effectively a kind of Black cultural capital in America. Sumner was born a block away from the African Meeting House, which is one of the oldest Black churches in the country. The Reverend at the African Meeting House, Reverend Thomas Paul, had actually made trips to Haiti and met General Boyer.
They would have annual parades celebrating Haitian independence in this neighborhood - they probably would walk right past Sumner's home. And one year, there was a man named Ibrahim ibn Suri, who was an enslaved person from the South who had come from the Fulani people of West Africa. Prince Ibrahim was a prince - his father was the king of the Fulani people - and had spent several decades enslaved in the South. But because he was fluent in Arabic and could read and write, he had managed to catch the attention of the local white community. He eventually corresponded with Henry Clay, Secretary of State, managed to get in touch with the Moroccan Embassy, and Morocco helped to negotiate his freedom.
Before he left to return to Africa, he came to Boston to go on a fundraising tour to raise money to buy the freedom of his grandchildren. And he's walking around in the streets of Boston in a blue cape, a crimson sash, a green silk Turkish cap with a crescent on it, and the local Bostonians are so shocked and amazed to see this. There's one Black Bostonian who said something like he never thought he would see an African prince before. And this African prince is telling them about Africa, about the kingdoms, the riches, the culture, and the governments that were in Africa.
We don't know if Sumner came across Prince Ibrahim, but we do know that his neighbors did. So we know that Sumner, from a young age, would have been exposed to the idea of Black self-governance, the concept of Black independence and Black success, and those ideas, I think, influenced the rest of his life.
Yaseen: That's really interesting to me, partially because Sumner ends up having one foot in and one foot out of the world of the Brahmins - the white elite of Boston. His family was poor, but he was also a nepo baby when he got to Harvard Law School. I mean, Sumner's dad was friends with Judge Story. So how do you think class figures into his moral formation and his eventual practice of law?
Zaakir: Yeah. So as you mentioned, Sumner's father went to Harvard. Sumner's grandfather also went to Harvard, but his father was a bastard child who had grown up poor and was still poor. So Sumner, on the one hand, is economically very disadvantaged. On the other hand, he's third-generation Harvard.
He began at Harvard, and then he went to law school, where he studied under Joseph Story, who happened to have been a classmate of his father when they were in college. Joseph Story is one of the most famous Supreme Court justices of all time. He was the great American jurist of that era, and Sumner very quickly gets enraptured by Story's brilliance. He gets pulled into Story's circle, and Story introduces him to many of the other so-called Brahmins of Boston.
The Brahmins were a patrician class. The term came from Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior, who was the father of the Supreme Court justice of the same name. The Brahmins saw themselves as the cultured elite of the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came to America, was so startled because he said that the aristocracy he saw in Boston was not dissimilar to the aristocracies of Europe, even though it was kind of, I think, Tocqueville's companion called it a "two-day-old aristocracy" because America really was relatively young. Yet there was this kind of pseudo-aristocracy of the rich, most of whom got their money through the textile industry. And the textile industry is, of course, fed by cotton.
So Boston, which is teeming with abolitionist ideas, which is the Black cultural capital of America, is also the economic hub of the textile industry, which is fueled by Southern slave-produced cotton—Sumner's in this environment.
He goes to Europe for a few years on Story's dime. He comes back, and Boston aristocrats are so excited to meet this young man who had been to France, England, Italy, and Germany. They start inviting him into their homes, and every day he is leaving his mother's home on the Black slope of Beacon Hill, going up to the top, and then going to the white slope of Beacon Hill. He is dining with wealthy men, including George Ticknor, who had a home right across from the Massachusetts State House. There he's enjoying oysters and cream cakes, and they're being served by Black stewards.
And the last thing someone in his position should do for social advancement is to speak against slavery. Slavery was not something that Boston aristocrats prided themselves on, unlike Southern aristocrats. They were very uncomfortable with it. But it was this kind of open secret that all their wealth and privilege were tied to the slave system of the South.
And Sumner had this guilt that kept tearing away at his soul between the neighborhood where he came from and the neighborhood where he was spending all his young adulthood. Eventually, he decides to start speaking out against slavery, and he loses that status as a young Brahmin, a young Brahmin in making, I should say.
Yaseen: Do you think this impacted how he thought about himself as a lawyer? I mean, there's this career story, too. He's a commercial litigator for a little bit. He's also a public interest lawyer. How does that bear out?
Zaakir: He was a commercial litigator, primarily representing merchants. He was doing very well at the beginning, and the merchants that he was representing were probably in many ways tied up with the slave trade, with the cotton trade, with the trade of textiles. And he becomes very disillusioned very quickly. He goes from having dozens of cases his first year of real practice to having close to zero within just a couple of years.
As that's going on, he's also getting really frustrated by the bar. He's noticing that it's not the smartest and most erudite who do well at the bar.
Yaseen: This is when people started joking that he was a “briefless barrister,” right?
Zaakir: It was a way of mocking him because he was so smart. No one questioned that he was the smartest young lawyer of his time, but he was certainly not the richest and certainly not the most successful, and he couldn't seem to hold on to any clients. He would submit these articles to local law reviews, and one older lawyer told him that the article is very good, but “you enjoy engaging in the speculative.”
Yaseen: Who among us does not enjoy engaging in the speculative? Who among us?
Zaakir: Right. It's so resonant with any law students today who faced similar dilemmas. And so for a time, as he becomes a social reformer, he almost forgets that he was a lawyer with a law practice. And one day in 1849, when he was 38 years old, a young Black attorney, Robert Morris, walked into his office and gave him a reason to feel pride in his profession.
Morris is 26 years old. He's our age. He's the first African American ever to win a jury trial, and he decides to represent a five-year-old Black girl who wanted to attend a white-only public school. Morris is the first person in the history of the United States to use litigation to try to integrate schools.
So Morris brings his case. He loses at the District Court. On appeal, it's going to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and he asks Sumner to join him in the case. Now, this case is social suicide for Sumner to take on. Even many abolitionists, even many white abolitionists in Boston, would have been horrified by the idea of having their schoolchildren in the same classrooms as Black students - they still had these racial prejudices, even if they hated slavery.
And Sumner agrees to take the case. Then he tells Morris he'll do it for free. And then he dedicates himself to writing this argument that becomes the blueprint for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP nearly a century later. He goes on to really pioneer this idea of a civil rights lawyer - this idea of using litigation, using legal training to advance social good.
Yaseen: Your book confidently takes on another complicated form of marginalization that impacted his life, which is his sexuality. I think retroactively categorizing the sexuality of a historical figure will always be fraught. But there's real value in understanding how his potential queerness shaped him, and also his relationships. I think your book points to Sumner’s relationship with Samuel Howe as part of why he sort of remembers mid-career that he’s a moral reformer. So, can you talk about how you dealt with this very public wrestling with marginalization at the Massachusetts Supreme Court, with this also private wrestling with marginalization in the romantic friendship, and how it related to Sumner’s moral formation?
Zaakir: So Sumner once jumped into a riot, thinking he could quell the violence. He was dead wrong. He gets knocked over. He's almost killed. He wasn't, even though he was 6 feet 4, particularly athletic, so he probably overestimated that his height would help him stop this riot. You can imagine he's thrown over, bricks are being thrown everywhere, and this older, strapping man comes in and literally rescues him. That man was Samuel Gridley Howe.
They become very close. I speculate that it was what we today would call a queer relationship, although I'm careful to emphasize that modern terms can only mean so much when retroactively applied to the past, as you noted. But whatever the relationship was, it was a deeply loving one. They were very close as friends. They were very close as soulmates, as Howe's daughter even described them.
Howe is a philanthropist. He’s a social reformer. He has that revolutionary spirit, and he sees that same spirit in Sumner. But Sumner has kind of suppressed it to do what Story and his other mentors had urged him to do. So, for example, even when Sumner went to Europe, one of his professors, Simon Greenleaf, wrote to him and advised him to return and be the conservative he's meant to be.
So Sumner has this internal battle between his mentors, who have decided that he's supposed to be a conservative, and his soulmate, who has decided that he's supposed to be a reformer. Then he's battling between the white side of Beacon Hill, where he is making his career, and the Black side of Beacon Hill, where he grew up and still lives. All those things are being wrestled with in his own heart and his own life, and they're not fully reconciled until he finally embraces the mold of a social reformer.
Yaseen: That's powerful. This is what your storytelling angle really illuminates. You paint Sumner as a precursor to the lawyers who pushed along the civil rights movement in the 20th century. And one thing that really struck me is that the segregated school at issue in Brown v. Board of Education was actually named after Sumner. Not only did Sumner himself argue a very similar case that was like a precedent case, as you brought up, in Roberts v. City of Boston, but he did so as part of one of the first-ever interracial legal teams in the country's history. Was it the first or one of the first?
Zaakir: The first. And like you said, when I realized that the elementary school at issue in Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas - a young girl named Linda Brown was trying to go to a white-only school, her father, Oliver Brown, was frustrated that they weren't accepting her, and then sued the school district - that school was Charles Sumner Elementary. In the book, I call it a "poetic injustice."Just think of the irony - Charles Sumner would roll in his grave if he had known that there were white-only schools in America named after him. He would be horrified.
Yaseen: This is the opposite of what Black Beacon Hill meant to him, I think.
Zaakir: Completely, completely.
Yaseen: But this brings me to the theme of legacy and history. Sumner is most well-known for being beaten on the Senate floor after giving his speech. How does your account deal with that legacy - that historically, he's a victim of physical violence?
Zaakir: So he gives this prominent anti-slavery speech called "The Crime Against Kansas," where he calls out the anti-democratic actions taking place by slaveholders in the Territory of Kansas, and he also calls out some of his own colleagues, including Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina, whom he characterizes as a rapist. I'm the first biographer to find evidence that Sumner's accusation was accurate. Butler had an enslaved person who was interviewed in the 1920s in his eighties, and that person recalled that Butler did have a mistress and had sired two children by her.
So Sumner is airing Butler's dirty laundry, so to speak, and it doesn't go over well. Butler had a nephew, unbeknownst to Sumner, who was a Congressman named Preston Brooks - a brash, provocative Congressman from South Carolina. Brooks decides that he needs to avenge his uncle's honor. He thinks about challenging Sumner to a duel, but he's afraid of the legal repercussions of a duel. He thinks about asking Sumner for an apology, but either he decides against it or he forgets, and instead he comes up to Sumner without seeking an apology on the Senate floor.
When Sumner looks up, Brooks says something to the effect that he's there to avenge the honor of South Carolina, and then he takes his gutta-percha gold-tipped cane and starts smashing it into Sumner's head. The blows are coming down so ferociously that Sumner had an injury of nearly an inch deep above his left ear, another injury on his forehead that was probably at least an inch wide. The cane shatters into pieces as Brooks is smashing it into Sumner's skull.
Yaseen: His relationships with both Black activists and intellectuals during Reconstruction, as well as the broader Black community, really touched me when I was reading your book. And it struck me the way that he was grieved during Reconstruction. Can you go a little bit into the Reconstruction Era, Sumner, and his relationships? You describe him at this time as not so triumphal about the end of slavery or Reconstruction, which set him apart from other abolitionists.
Zaakir: Yeah, so a bit on the relationships first. I've been asked before, why am I writing about a white abolitionist? Because I think there's a lot of skepticism today of white abolitionists, often rightly so, because many white abolitionists had this kind of savior complex. They had this pietistic sympathy for enslaved people. Still, they didn't have any real living Black people in their daily lives, and they didn't particularly care about Black voting or about Black equality in a meaningful sense.
Sumner was not one of them. Even at a moment where Black people are free, can vote, and can hold elected office, he is still very, very anxious because Blacks and whites are still not in the same schools. They're still not sitting at the restaurant table together, and he was worried that there could be backlash and then retrenchment of white supremacy if, for example, Black and white schoolchildren were not learning together. Because if they're not learning together, then how are they going to build a republic together?
So he continues to push during this era. He collaborates with a man named John Mercer Langston, who is the first Dean of Howard Law School, the first law school in America to be open to both Black people and women. He asks Langston to write up a bill that would essentially be a national integration bill by guaranteeing a right of public accommodation for anyone, regardless of race, in a common carrier.
Langston writes the first draft, Sumner introduces it in the Senate, and he spends the last few years of his life pushing to get this bill passed while Langston works on the outside with activists to mobilize and lobby for the bill.
[One of] the tragedies of Reconstruction is that the bill in its strongest form did not pass. It gets whittled down - the school's provision is taken out, many enforcement provisions are removed - and the bill is passed only after Sumner's death, and then the Supreme Court overturns it eight years later. Then we see the rise of Jim Crow, which could have been avoided entirely if Sumner's [original] bill had been passed and enforced.
Yaseeni: This is such a powerful part of the book - his last words essentially were "Get the bill passed. Get the bill passed. I don't care. Give me some morphine and get the bill passed."
Zaakir: Right. So Sumner has a heart attack. He's dying, and he's high on morphine. And what's striking about this is, you know, in some ways you might see someone's true colors when they're high on morphine or something like that - their inhibitions are down. What are they thinking of in these final moments?
And Sumner keeps trying to get up, and they're holding him down, and then he says to his secretary, "Take care of my bill." His secretary responds, "Don't worry. I'll pay your household bills. You're not going to die in debt." And he responds, "No, you don't understand me. I mean the Civil Rights Bill. Take care of the Civil Rights Bill."
He was trying to get up because he was trying to get himself dressed to go to the Senate. Only a few weeks earlier, he had told George Downing, who was a Black caterer and restaurateur who lived near his home, "Could I crawl to the Capitol and pass a Civil Rights Bill, I would be reconciled to death." It was a dying wish.
Frederick Douglass is in his room as he dies. The Speaker of the House is there, many U.S. Senators are there, many Congressmen are there, diplomats, and they're all hearing him say over and over and over again, "Take care of the Civil Rights Bill. Don't let the Civil Rights Bill fail." And he uses his death as a moment to remobilize the country, to try to get this bill passed.
Yaseen: One interesting thread in the book is that Sumner’s pursuit of racial justice through federal power was called “imperialism” by Southern whites. You say he just responded by calling it “the imperialism of human rights.” But you also describe how his idea of racial justice was closely tied to his anti-imperialism. Do you think that double commitment looks the same today as it did for Sumner - that to be for racial equality in this country is to be sort of an imperialist at home, or at least comfortable with a certain level of government power, and an anti-imperialist away from home?
Zaakir: One thing I do on the very first page of the book is compare Charles Sumner to Martin Luther King, Jr., which is a very bold comparison, and I was nervous even as I was writing it. I was very honored when Jonathan Eig, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King, decided to write a blurb for my book, so I feel a bit vindicated that there are some key similarities between Sumner and King, one of them being this tension between fighting imperialism abroad and fighting for civil rights at home.
So King had this falling out with LBJ over the Vietnam War, and King broke with a lot of other civil rights leaders by using his platform to speak against the daily bombing and killing of children in Vietnam, which in many ways arguably undermined the cause for civil rights domestically. King lost his relationship with LBJ, which made it much harder to pass ongoing legislation, and he lost some of his own personal stature. But King felt that he had to do it as a matter of moral principle, and that it was impossible to only advocate for people of color domestically if he wasn't doing the same for people abroad.
Sumner has the same tension during Reconstruction. When President Grant was in office, he pursued this project to annex the Dominican Republic, which borders modern-day Haiti, and Sumner was horrified by this plan. Grant had effectively collaborated with the current "President" of the Dominican Republic at the time, who was essentially a dictator. Grant had sent naval ships to stay on the Dominican coast to menace anyone who was opposed to this dictator and to kind of prop up the dictator's regime, and that dictator was effectively going to sell his country to the United States and then try to get some personal security for himself.
Sumner is horrified by this whole thing. He's particularly nervous because the Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti, which was the first Black republic and also the first country in the history of the world to abolish slavery fully. Sumner has this affection for Haiti going back to his childhood because of the stories he heard from his father and the parades that went on in his neighborhood.
He meets the Haitian ambassador, who's frightened by this, and the Haitian ambassador writes to the Secretary of State and effectively asks him if Grant is trying to annex the Dominican Republic, will the United States ever try to invade or take Haiti? And Secretary Fish, the Secretary of State for Grant, responds and says, "You have no right to question the President of the United States," and refuses to answer the question.
So Haiti's alarmed because they fear, even if Grant doesn't try to take Haiti, the next President might, because they share an island with the Dominican Republic. If half the island becomes American, the other half might be next. Sumner was afraid that America would be a predatory republic that would go into the Caribbean and elsewhere to take land, to take resources, to extract, and to control and dominate. And he says at one point that he was afraid that America might one day only respect the laws of armed conflict with "populous, large, strong, or white countries and not to thinly peopled, small, weak, or Black countries."
So he coordinates directly with the Haitian ambassador to oppose this, and he basically nukes his own career to stop Dominican annexation. He succeeds in stopping annexation, but in the process, he loses his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He's cast out from the Republican Party, and then he decides to formally exit the Republican Party and campaign against Grant in the 1872 election. He breaks with many civil rights leaders - he even breaks with Frederick Douglass, who thought Dominican annexation was a great idea because America could bring in more Black citizens and could educate them on democracy.
Though Douglass would always insist that Sumner's heart was pure, that even if they had this political conflict, Sumner had his heart in the right place, even if they didn't see eye to eye. Sumner maintained a good relationship with Douglass until the end. But they had this strong political fight over annexation, and Sumner died a lonely man in many ways because he staked his reputation on fighting foreign imperialism.
Yaseen: But the legacy there - I mean, you talk about his protégé becoming friends with W.E.B. Du Bois over the resistance to the annexation of the Philippines.
Zaakir: Right. So Sumner has this secretary, Moorfield Storey (no relation to Judge Story), who was a dropout from Harvard Law School. When the secretary is about to start working for him, Sumner shows him to his room - he's going to live with Sumner - and he tells this young man that when he was young, he would stay at the home of Chancellor James Kent, who's a great American jurist, kind of the American Blackstone, and that when Kent was young, he would stay at the home of Alexander Hamilton.
So effectively telling this young secretary, "No pressure, right? It's only Hamilton to Kent, now to you." And so this guy, Moorfield Storey, is a dropout from Harvard Law School. He's in his mid-twenties, and he's Sumner's secretary during this fight over Dominican annexation. Moorfield Storey grows up and becomes president of the American Bar Association. After that, he decides to speak out against the United States' war in the Philippines.
And after he writes a pamphlet to that effect, he gets a letter from W.E.B. Du Bois. They decide to meet to discuss the Philippine annexation, and they become friends. Du Bois is a great Black intellectual and thinker, and together they come up with the idea of creating an interracial civil rights organization to fight for Black liberty and equality. It's called the NAACP, and Moorfield becomes the first president.
Yaseen: That's a great legacy, right?
Zaakir: It's like Sumner's mentee is the founder of the NAACP, and also, you have this direct line from Alexander Hamilton to Kent to Sumner to the founder of the NAACP.
Yaseen: It's the continuity. We think of these eras as so different from one another. But here's a person whose grandpa fought in the Revolutionary War who's mentoring the founder of the NAACP. History is wild that way.
But to this point, the last major biography of Sumner was David Donald's, and it assassinated Sumner's character. You quote it, calling his activism "moral terrorism." And you referred to a 1961 review of the book that relates the character assassination to the contemporary criticism of civil rights activists like the Freedom Riders.
So in America today, activists continue to be beaten, fired, suspended, expelled, deported, and even killed for public advocacy. And you kind of end on this warning that Sumner's life saw both incredible progress toward racial justice and incredible backlash to that progress. So nothing is inevitable. And I guess what I want to ask you then is, what does it mean to you to tell this story of Sumner now?
Zaakir: First, Sumner teaches us that the challenges [we face] today have been ongoing since the founding of this country - the challenges over race, democracy, and constitutional law. But there's also - I think it's a story that could lead you to despair because you see how close America was to egalitarian multiracial democracy, and then it slipped away.
But it's also a story of incredible inspiration because Sumner saw something wrong, and he did something about it. On the one hand, he's a highly erudite, talented man who becomes a U.S. Senator, but on the other hand, he's just a poor kid from the wrong side of Beacon Hill in Boston. He grew up to help write the Emancipation Proclamation, to help wage a Civil War, to help emancipate more than 4 million enslaved people, and to come up with the idea of public education. What he's able to achieve is so remarkable. And there's a lot we can learn from that today.
Part of what was so extraordinary about Sumner in late life is that he spent a lot of his time engaging in mentorship, which we've touched on. And there are not a lot of U.S. Senators today who would spend hours of their time mentoring young law students, young activists, and the like. But that's what Sumner would do. There were Black law students at Howard who could just go to Sumner's house at any time - this American senator, one of the most famous senators alive - and talk to him and get his advice. He would coordinate his activities with them.
Similarly with Moorfield Storey, who became the founder of the NAACP, and with others. He really believed in the power of young people to grow up and to be a seismic force for good. He believed that nothing's inevitable, that this country can be better, that this country can be redeemed if enough work and enough energy is put into it. And that's what he did with his whole career.
Yaseen: I think about Sumner right now in terms of this "nothing is inevitable" mentality. And I want to bring it back to you. There's Sumner, the public advocate, the speaker, the one who took the beating on the Senate floor. But there are also decades of people retelling that story to different ends. History books tell this story as if it were partisan politics gone too far, and that's incomplete. So there is a way in which you're not telling simply a history, right? There's a corrective that's happening here. I'm not trying to undermine the objectivity of your work in a bad way, but it does feel like it's a commentary, the way you might argue Donald's biography was a commentary. How much do you accept that those are your stakes in this biography?
Zaakir: Yeah. So what stood out to me about Sumner that I think is important to today is the way that he used courage as a tool for his politics. And, I think, there's no such thing as objective history. But I'm striving to tell the truth and the whole truth, right? We're always after that objective goal in our historical writing. But yet there are obvious lessons we can draw for the present moment in which we live, and one of those is his courage.
So, for example, before giving the speech that led to the caning, other senators were warning him not to give the speech because it could lead to violence. And he goes full throttle ahead, and he tells people, in one of his letters, that he planned to give the "most thorough philippic ever uttered in a legislative body" - a philippic being just like a very provocative, intense speech. He intended to write the most provocative speech of all American history - that was his stated objective. And his aim for doing that was to draw attention to the crisis in Kansas, where Southern slavecrats, including a former senator, were literally taking over polling locations at gunpoint and stuffing the ballots, trying to force Kansas to become a slave state.
Yaseen: Sounds familiar.
Zaakir: And so in that time of anti-democratic threats, he decided to put his own body on the line in his capacity as U.S. Senator to draw attention to the threat, to galvanize the public, to organize for democracy. And we live in a time, especially for young Americans, who are very frustrated and who see that our political leaders are not doing much, or even if they are, they're doing it in a very cowardly way. We've not seen real courage from anyone in this current environment. And that's what we're sorely lacking.
And the last thing I'll say on this is, I think a lot of conservative history is just kind of glorifying America's past and telling this too-good-to-be-true narrative of American history, where everything's been great and has always been great, and America's enlightened, blah blah blah. And then I think there's been a danger on the other side from progressives who have told American history as simply a story of failure and doom, and almost as if oppression and genocide and slavery and racial domination will always be in America's DNA, and that there is no way to redeem this country.
Both narratives are incredibly stifling because they leave you with no room to do anything about it. If America is inherently A or B, how do you ever make it into something else?
What I wanted to do was tell a story about the agency of Sumner and other activists who grew up in a time in which America was a nation of white supremacy and domination, genocide and slavery, and transformed it, even if briefly, into a true multiracial, egalitarian democracy with liberty and freedom for all. And if they could do it then, perhaps we can do it now.
