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Ashley Osment: a life for social justice, joy

Posted on June 3, 2010June 3, 2010 by Taylor Sisk

By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL — A bright-eyed, cheerful presence; a force. Skilled legal strategist and tactician. Fierce champion of justice and advocate for an underdog. Pragmatist, optimist, relisher of the richness of life. A musician. A mother.

Civil-rights lawyer Ashley Osment, 46, died Friday at 9:30 p.m. in her Chapel Hill home. The cause of death was ovarian cancer. She will be sorely missed by the community she had made her home for nearly three decades. Osment put her shoulder to the task of making this community, and the world, a more socially just one, and relentlessly inched that task forward.

“She never allowed you to think you couldn’t do it,” her longtime friend and fellow civil-rights lawyer Mark Dorosin said. “You just have to stay engaged.”

Born in West Asheville and raised a stone’s throw from the Jackson County courthouse in downtown Sylva, Osment remained the mountain minister’s daughter, the echoes of those Smokies in her voice, the big open smile and appraising eyes. While still a teenager, she bought three acres of land near Highlands and with the help of her grandfather and friends built a cabin there that became a place she treasured throughout her life, and where she returned each Easter to relax with family and friends.

She won a scholarship to Western Carolina University for an essay she wrote about mountain music called “No Better Gift,” but decided after her freshman year to come to UNC, where she majored in history. She then went to work in the Washington, D.C. offices of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but returned after three years and continued to make her presence known in the community – first as the manager of Internationalist Books and then, after attaining a law degree from UNC, as a civil-rights lawyer in practice with her future husband Al McSurely.

Among Osment’s considerable achievements was a lawsuit she won for the UNC Housekeepers’ Association, in which then-Chancellor Michael Hooker agreed to a settlement of more than a million dollars that included pay raises, career training, child care and recognition of the union as the housekeepers’ representative.

In 2005, Osment joined the UNC Center for Civil Rights, where she took on educational inequality.

“Through her fierce sense of justice and her disarming personal style,” center co-founder and dean of the UNC Law School Jack Boger wrote last week, Osment earned the “full confidence of black NAACP veterans and Latino activists on the one hand, and Harvard and UCLA empirical social scientists, Ford Foundation program officers, and nationally renowned legal scholars on the other.

“With an inimitable cheerfulness, candor and open personal style, joined with a brilliant mind and relentless use of sophisticated legal and social scientific tools to redress injustices, Ashley led the UNC Center’s advocacy efforts in public education for nearly five years.”

Even as cancer spread throughout her body, Osment continued with her work. In the spring of 2010, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro branch of the NAACP awarded her its Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award.

But it was perhaps as a mother to Sunny, now 13, that she found her fullest expression. She didn’t hide the manifestations of her illness from her daughter. “She knows,” Osment told The Citizen in March. “She definitely knows. She knows how many milligrams of Oxycontin I take. She and I are very connected. I couldn’t deceive her if I wanted to.”

And her ability to balance and blend it all astounded and inspired those around her.

Dorosin, a colleague of Osment’s at the Center for Civil Rights, said: “She had this innate ability to focus, at all times, on everything that was important to her. She maintained her passion and commitment to it all. Everyone admired that in her.”

Of her life with cancer, she told The Citizen, “What I know is that I’m more conscious of who I love being around,” citing her family, kids in general and dogs.

“I’m realizing now what an inspiration she was to me in both my professional and personal lives,” Dorosin said on Tuesday. “I feel a sense of rededication.”

PHOTO BY AVA BARLOW. Ashley Osment with her daughter, Sunny, and husband, Al McSurely.

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