PositiveThe AtlanticConstitutional-law scholar Zaakir Tameez portrays his subject as the Martin Luther King Jr. of the 19th century, a man who originated key legal concepts behind civil-rights victories beyond his time. Twentieth-century historians tended to paint the senator as an ineffectual hothead, but Tameez maintains that Sumner’s in-your-face style helped shock a complacent nation into action ... Tameez credits him as a prime intellectual force behind the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. He wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was passed the year after his death and became the model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A school-integration case he argued in the 1840s inspired Brown v. Board of Education. The list goes on.
