Charles Sumner was a household name in his era. Friends with Charles Dickens, de Tocqueville, and Emerson, the abolitionist and civil rights crusader was called “a colossus holding his burning heart in his hand” by Henry Longfellow. Sumner coined the phrase, “equality before the law” in an argument before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1849. He was an advisor to Lincoln and an ally of Frederick Douglass. In his new biography, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation, Zaakir Tameez brings back, in living color, the nearly forgotten statesman’s achievements, such as his role in helping ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Dorothy Wickenden, author of The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights, will talk with Tameez about the ideas that remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, equality, democracy, and constitutional law.