In the biographies of John Brown, Nat Turner, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., Oates examined the lives of men committed to the struggle for equality.
He wrote that "[a]ll four were driven, visionary men, all were caught up in the issues of slavery and race, and all devised their own solutions to those inflammable problems [a]nd all perished, too, in the conflicts and hostilities that surrounded the quest for equality in this country.
"[1] Oates was accused of plagiarism in 1993, when an early artificial intelligence engine identified a couple of "language and rhetorical strategies of other scholars" among the tens of thousands of sentences he published throughout his career.
Of Oates, Burns said: “Stephen was an extremely valuable advisor to our Civil War series and an informed and passionate participant.
[4] Let the Trumpet Sound; The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 1983 Book Award presented annually to the book that "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.