David Garrow

David Jeffries Garrow (born May 11, 1953) is an American author and historian.^[1] He wrote the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.^[2][3] He also wrote Liberty and Sexuality (1994), a history of the legal struggles over abortion and reproductive rights in the U.S. prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017), and other works.^[4][5]

Professional historians and scholars in other fields have criticized Garrow's later work on Martin Luther King. In 2019 Garrow authored an article for the magazine Standpoint in which he wrote he had seen a Federal Bureau of Investigation file with a handwritten note on it claiming King had witnessed, failed to prevent, and encouraged a sexual assault by another minister. Garrow said he found it credible. King specialists and COINTELPRO historians described it as deeply irresponsible and excessively credulous in accepting the claim by an organization given a remit to destroy King and his reputation.^[6]