Carl Upchurch
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Carl Douglass Upchurch was an acclaimed author and educator. He was born in Philadelphia in 1950, and died on May 2, 2003, in Bexley, Ohio.
A troubled childhood and 10 years of incarceration defined his faith, his family, and ultimately his life's work. From 1982 until his death, Upchurch attended to the needs of thousands through his work with prisoners, public speaking, writing and leadership. His ideas on prison reform inspired him to found the Progressive Prisoners' Movement in the mid-1980s. For his work, Upchurch was awarded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's National Peace Award and the Fellowship of Reconciliation's Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Award in 1988. His vision for inner-city peace led to the development of the Council for Urban Peace and Justice in 1992, and consequently, the first national Gang Summit in Kansas City, in 1993. That same year, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition awarded Upchcurch their National Humanitarian Award.
Upchurch was a contributing columnist on race and social justice issues for Columbus Alive, and went on to write his autobiography, Convicted in the Womb, which was published by Bantam Books in 1996. Showtime Cable Television made Upchurch's life story into a movie, Conviction, in 2002, which earned an NAACP Image Award nomination. Upchurch held a B.S. and a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and did graduate work at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana and at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Bexley, Ohio. His commitment to education, civic & urban issues, and political justice earned him a national reputation. He worked for several years with Community Connection in Columbus, Ohio, and regularly spoke at prisons, schools and universities around the country. Upchurch was married and had three daughters.
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