Here is a gift link to the most interesting thing you will read this weekend, maybe this week. It’s a conversation between Jamelle Bouie and Zaakir Tameez, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, who has written a new biography of the great anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner. I would guess that many of you, like me, were aware of only the tiniest bit of his story and had little knowledge of the importance of his influence on American politics for over a century.
This is just a bit of it. Do read the whole thing. It’s fascinating:
Charles Sumner grew up in a series of contradictions. I’ll tell you just two. First, he’s a third-generation Harvard-educated man. His father went to Harvard, his grandfather went to Harvard, and he went to Harvard. But he also grew up in poverty because his father was a bastard child of his grandfather. Didn’t have any of the wealth and privileges that came with that. His father also was just a lawyer who was really bad at being a lawyer. He just couldn’t seem to make any money. And so they grew up impoverished. His mom was a seamstress.
That leads to the second contradiction, which is that Sumner grew up in a predominantly African American neighborhood in Boston in the 1810s and 1820s because his parents could not afford to live in any other part of town and also because his father was a true racial egalitarian. He was known to tip his hat walking past Black Bostonians. He always said that he wished for the day when Black people would be judges in Boston. Interestingly, he insisted on using the term “people of color” to refer to his neighbors. I thought of this as a modern term, but I see it in his diary.
Now put all that aside. Sumner grows up, goes to Harvard, goes to law school, is trained by Joseph Story, a prominent justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. And as a result, he gets inculcated in a very conservative aristocratic academic environment. His teachers wanted him to become a corporate lawyer, and that’s what he does after law school. And yet as he practices law with the merchant class of Boston, many of whom make their profits off slavery, he still lives in his mother’s home in the Black part of town.
His contradictions are things that he wrestles with throughout his early adulthood.
What did his peers think of his closeness with Black Bostonians?
So when he was a kid, he was bullied in school for coming from the Black part of town. And the main bully, interestingly enough, was a young Wendell Phillips. So Wendell Phillips is one of the leading American abolitionists, kind of the right-hand man to William Lloyd Garrison. But Phillips is a real Boston blue-blooded Brahmin. His father was the first mayor of the city. And Wendell Phillips, as a kid, was definitely a racist and definitely prejudiced. He was kind of the alpha male of the school because of his privileges. And so he bullied Sumner. They went all the way through Boston Latin School. They went to Harvard College together. They didn’t even become friends until law school.
When he entered politics his evolution through the anti-slavery movement is super interesting. He took a brave abolitionist stance as a Senator that brought him to the moment we all know from our high school classes — his caning on the floor of the Senate. His speeches, his proposed legislation and his accomplishments were all felt over the next century as the country’s relationship with its Black citizens was tested over and over and over again.
There were always people in America who weren’t racists, which proves that however common it was, some people knew it was bullshit. It’s always possible to be a decent human being.