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David Garrow Biography
David Jeffries Garrow is a great author and historian, who was born in the United States on May 11, 1953.
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he authored in 1986, was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Among his previous publications are Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) and Liberty and Sexuality (1994), which chronicle the legal battles over abortion and reproductive rights in the United States before the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
David Garrow Wiki
Name: David Jeffries Garrow
Date of birth: May 11, 1953
Place of birth: New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation(s): Historian, author
Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1987
Education: Wesleyan University in 1975
Alma mater: Duke University in 1981
Garrow’s later research on Martin Luther King has drawn criticism from academic historians and experts in other disciplines.
Garrow claimed to have seen an FBI file with a handwritten note saying King had witnessed, failed to stop, and promoted a sexual assault by another minister in a 2019 piece he authored for the journal Standpoint.
Garrow claimed to have believed the assertion. It was deemed “deeply irresponsible” and “excessively credulous” by a number of academics, including King specialists and COINTELPRO historians, to believe the assertion from a group with a mission to discredit King and his legacy.
David Garrow Life and career
Garrow, the son of Barbara (Fassett) and Walter Garrow, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1981 after graduating with honors from Wesleyan University in 1975.
Garrow often provides essays to non-academic journals like The New York Times, The Nation, The Financial Times, and The New Republic on the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the history of the US Supreme Court.
For the award-winning PBS television history of the Civil Rights Movement covering the years 1954–1965, Eyes on the Prize, Garrow served as a senior adviser.
He previously held the positions of instructor of history at Duke University from 1978 to 1979, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1980 to 1984, associate and full professor of history at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center from 1984 to 1991, visiting distinguished professor of history at The Cooper Union from 1992 to 1993, James Pinckney Harrison visiting professor of history at the College of William and Mary from 1994 to 1995, and distinguished professor of history at American University from 1996 to 1997.
Garrow served as a senior research fellow at Cambridge’s Homerton College from 2005 to 2011. He held the positions of John E. Murray Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law and History at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law from 2011 to 2018.
Garrow belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America in 1987.
According to Garrow, who studied FBI data in 2019, Martin Luther King Jr. may have supported sexual assault and failed to stop it. Garrow stated in a letter that he was reevaluating his opinion on King.
Garrow authored a piece about King that was turned down by the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Guardian. The piece appeared in the now-defunct Standpoint magazine, a British conservative publication.
Many writers deemed Garrow’s assertion to be untrustworthy. Many experts view Garrow’s reliance on a handwritten note attached to a typed report to be bad scholarship.
In believing the veracity of FBI reports at a time when the FBI was running a significant campaign to try to discredit King as part of its COINTELPRO activities, Peter Ling of the University of Nottingham noted that Garrow was overly credulous, if not naive.
Ling’s work on King, which is largely regarded as authoritative, was previously described as “thoughtful, perceptive, and thoroughly well-informed” by Garrow.
Concerns concerning Garrow’s scholarship have been raised by experts in 20th-century American history such as Jeanne Theoharis, Barbara Ransby of the University of Illinois at Chicago, N. D. B. Connolly of Johns Hopkins University, and Glenda Gilmore of Yale University.
Theoharis said, “Most scholars I know would penalize graduate students for doing this.” It is not the first time that the accuracy and thoroughness of Garrow’s work have been seriously questioned.
Edith Lee-Payne, a longtime advocate for civil rights, hypothesized that Garrow might have published his work in the field to attract “personal attention” for himself.
David Barrow Wife
Garrow; married Susan Foster Newcomer, December 18, 1984.