Hello, friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center,

and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate.

The National Constitution Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit, chartered by Congress, to increase

awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.

Zachartemise is the author of the superb new book, Charles Sumner, Conscience of a Nation.

It's a deeply researched biography of Senator Charles Sumner, the constitutional visionary who helped to write the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law.

Zocker joins me now to discuss Charles Sumner's life and constitutional legacy.

Zacher Tamiz is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law, a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia. He's published

award-winning scholarship and co-authored amicus briefs before Texas and the U.S. Supreme Court.

He's a Fulbright scholar and a Humanity in Action, senior fellow from Houston, Texas. The book is out

on June 3rd. Zocker, it is wonderful to welcome you to We the People.

Jeff, it is wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to discuss the book. I read it in galleys. I heard about it from our teacher,

Akeel Amar, because you wrote this book amazingly as a third-year student at Yale Law School.

Tell us more about what led you to write this book and to resurrect the central story of

Charles Sumner. The book began in Akeel Amar's class. I was looking at the brief that Thurgood

Marshall and the N.A.C.P. filed in Brown versus Board.

And what struck me about this brief is that Marshall cites Charles Sumner by name.

Not once, not twice, but more than 40 times.

Because Charles Sumner, more than 100 years earlier, before Brown,

before the Freedom Riders, before Rosa Parks and Thurgan Marshall and all that,

collaborated with a black attorney named Robert Morris, and together they tried to integrate

...