Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – Earlier this year, out of the blue, I received a most unusual query about the cover of Caste — and its landmark photo of hundreds of real-life people from all walks of life.
A woman in California, Linda Sokolnicki, reached out wanting to know where the photo was taken because she saw her father’s face in it.
The photo shows some of the quarter million people gathered at the 1963 March on Washington where MLK delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
I asked her which man was her father, and she sent me an image of the book with a circle around a man with a heart-shaped face in a priest’s collar. She said her father, Gene Curry, was a retired Episcopal priest in Michigan, a gentle and humble man who was up in years now at 88 and that his health and memory were not what they once were.
The discovery began with his wife, Ruth.
A friend of hers, a principal, had told her that “if I only read one book this year, this is the one I should select.” So Ruth ordered Caste. “When I got it, I saw Gene‘s picture on the cover. That is how it all started.”
Rev. Curry sent a group text to his children about being on the cover. The daughter ordered the book and immediately spotted him. Her husband happened to hear an interview of mine and told her, “I just heard this interview, and I’m thinking about getting this book called Caste.”
Linda said, “That’s the book I was telling you about with my Dad on the cover!”
Gene Curry, born in 1936, worked as an engineer and served as a priest at a church in Detroit, whose rectory doors were always open to the poor. When the first black residents moved to their block, the Curry family befriended them while other whites fled. During Covid, he placed blessed ashes on the foreheads of motorists in a snowstorm at Lent.
The discovery was a gorgeously full circle moment. Had the photo not wrapped around the back of the book and been positioned just so, his face would not have been visible. Had his wife not ordered the hardcover, they would never have seen his face — it was cropped out of the smaller-sized paperback.
This is the time of year to honor miracles, and the things that are meant to be. | Posted on 25/Dec/2024 03:10:28
