David J. Garrow

David J. Garrow was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1953. He graduated from Wesleyan University and earned a doctorate at Duke University. He has taught history and law at several universities, among them the City College of New York, Emory and the University of Pittsburgh.

His work centers on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1981) used government files to document the bureau's surveillance and harassment of King. Bearing the Cross (1986) is a full biography of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, from the Montgomery bus boycott to his murder in 1968. Built on hundreds of interviews and archival records, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1987. He was also a senior adviser to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize.

His later books include Liberty and Sexuality (1994), a history of the legal fight over abortion before Roe v. Wade, and Rising Star (2017), about the young Barack Obama. A 2019 essay on sealed FBI files about King's private life drew criticism from other historians for trusting the bureau's records.