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COPYRIGHT 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Byline: Margo Harakas
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ I got a feeling, everything's gonna be all right, be all right, be all right....
Rosalind Osgood claps her hands, her voice rising, body swaying at this noontime Bible study at New Mount Olive Baptist Church in Florida.
Sixteen years ago, it looked like nothing in Osgood's life was going to be right. Using and selling cocaine, sleeping in cardboard boxes in an overgrown lot off Sistrunk Boulevard, she was without doubt one sorry, sorry mess.
Then, oh Lord, the crack house shooting. And she the only witness.
Osgood fled, hid out at her grandmother's house for two weeks. By that time, the victim had died and the shooter had surrendered.
Undaunted, Osgood went right back to the streets and getting high. Until she found she was pregnant again.
Doesn't seem a likely narrative for this stylish Fort Lauderdale woman with the doctorate and more accolades than most folks earn in a lifetime.
Hers was for sure one perilous and uncertain journey.
"It's an example," says her daughter, Shennette Sheffield, 17, "of how someone can come from the bottom and lift themselves up." Rather than an embarrassment, Shennette finds in her mother's story "a positive message." Proof of redemption and the possibilities of hope.
"I'm so happy and proud of her I can't even explain it," says Osgood's grandmother, Agnes Wade, 81. Wade wasn't present last October when the Urban League of Broward County, Fla., honored Osgood, president and CEO of Mount Olive Development Corp., with its Kathleen Wright Legacy Award. But the pride certainly welled up in her. And come Feb. 26, she most definitely will be on the sidelines when Osgood, being honored as one of the outstanding people in the community, waves from a car in the Sistrunk Festival Parade.
"She added a whole lot of years on to my life," says Wade, smiling broadly. "Yes, she did."
And far more...
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