Project Diary: foreshadowing in Sarasota

Betty Rose Harvin in 2024

Nearly fifty years after Marilyn’s escape to Oakland her mom Betty Rose still lived in Sarasota, in tree-shaded Arlington Park, right at the very edge of the eponymous tree-filled park itself, in an old, one-story house packed tight with eighty-five years of life, framed photos, old fans, elephant and crawdad statuettes, stuff. In a blazing southern spring I had accompanied Marilyn and her family on their annual visit to Sarasota. So much that had happened here seemed to foreshadow what would go down in Oakland twenty-five years later. There were stories I wanted to hear directly from Betty Rose, familiar stories of close-knit neighbors raising their children in trust and cooperation, of churchgoing, of petty, blundering juvenile crime, of bloody and violent injustice. There was the silence of law enforcement after violence. There was even an endangered pregnancy. It all seemed too familiar. But mostly I wanted to meet the woman who had raised this person who, in my view, had had the vision to discover, and deliver, a previously unrecognized human right to support after violence, who had progressed out of penury and obscurity to become an icon of healing and justice in my city. Where did it all begin? How did it begin?