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.
[1][2] 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.
In 2019 Garrow authored an article for the magazine Standpoint in which he wrote he had seen a Federal Bureau of Investigation file claiming King had witnessed, failed to prevent, and encouraged a sexual assault by another minister.
Garrow served as a senior adviser for Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning PBS television history of the Civil Rights Movement covering the years 1954–1965.
[15] The long-time civil rights activist Edith Lee-Payne suggested Garrow may have published his work in the area to obtain "personal attention" for himself.