Rate My Professor David Garrow

Garrow's research specializations include the history of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, FBI surveillance of King, the Selma civil rights protests, the American reproductive rights struggle and the making of Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court history and clerks, civil rights issues, abortion, Brown v. Board of Education, FBI and intelligence agencies, gay marriage and equality, U.S. presidential history, and contemporary U.S. politics. Key publications feature Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986), which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (1978); The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From 'Solo' to Memphis (1981); Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (1994, updated 1998); and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017). He edited The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1987), co-edited The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (1987, 1991) and The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox: A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR’s Washington (2002), and served as senior advisor for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize and editorial advisor for the Library of America’s Reporting Civil Rights (2003). Garrow's articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Journal of American History, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He has featured in documentaries such as the Emmy-nominated Who Killed Malcolm X? (2020) and Oscar-shortlisted MLK/FBI (2021).