Introduction

In this digital publication, we invite you to explore with us the ways in which the confluence of time, place, community and ideas led to transformation in the historical moment of February 1960 and may continue to do so in our lives today. Our goal here is to take up the question(s) of opportune moments and their ephemerality – what ancient Greek rhetoricians called kairos – to explore how and to what extent we can sustain, extend, or re-experience these moments of change in and with our communities.

Throughout this digital monograph, we examine the idea of an opportune moment as the coming together of time, place, people and communicative acts. Our examination focuses on the rhetorical work that undergirds the Virtual Martin Luther King project, its impact, contributions and consequences. We also illuminate how digital technologies and their resultant world building capacities may serve to activate possibilities that were constructed in and by the speech in 1960 but left dormant in previous history. We invite you to join us in reaching back to ignite what had/has not yet happened, to explore  experiences that resonate from past to present and to project possible futures for ethical advocacy in an ever-changing civic landscape.

Just days after the start of the Greensboro sit-ins in February 1960, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered what would become a widely influential speech titled, “A Creative Protest [Fill Up the Jails].” The speech marked the first time Dr. King openly encouraged civil rights activists (promising the full support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) to disrupt and break the law through direct non-violent confrontation even if it meant “filling up the jails.” The speech served to catalyze the movement. Despite the historical and rhetorical significance of this speech, it lay dormant: no audio recordings have been found and the original location of the speech, White Rock Baptist Church church building, was torn down just seven years later to make way for urban renewal, specifically, the Durham Freeway.

The Virtual Martin Luther King Project began as a partnership between the White Rock Baptist church congregation and local scholars who worked together to host and record a public recreation of King’s speech at the church’s current sanctuary on June 8, 2014. Featuring a voice actor, Mr. Marvin Blanks, enacting/performing King’s speech, White Rock pastors and deacons, and the church choir, the recreation event attracted over 250 people. The audience for the recreation included individuals who had attended/heard the speech in 1960, area politicians, activists, members of the Durham Ministerial Alliance, congregation members, and members of the NC State community. It was funded in part by a small grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council. The audio director at a local game development studio, his father and a digital production faculty member at NC State, captured audio and video recordings of the event. Based on these sound recordings, we utilized digital and audio technologies to develop the components and experiences that would become the Kit of Parts of the vMLK Project.

For more information about the phases of the project see here.

In 2013-14, when we began the research and development work that resulted in what is now the vMLK Project, a national conversation about Black history, commemoration and civic life was gaining momentum. In 2016, the NC State Libraries became the lone academic library among ten awardees chosen by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to receive the National Medal for Museum and Library Service, as well as the first academic library to be recognized with this award in more than a decade. The award is the nation’s highest honor for extraordinary public service, recognizing institutions that are valuable community anchors. This recognition, and the visionary work that went into making the NC State Libraries the premier technology library in the country, inspired us to think about what we could do with a remarkable set of technological resources in relation to humanistic inquiry at a pivotal moment in our nation’s history.

In other words, we found ourselves in a moment of opportunity, a moment of confluence. In North Carolina, we witnessed the advent of the Moral Monday Protests ² led by Rev. William J. Barber II Raleigh, NC, in reaction to growing hostility to State policies that negatively and disproportionately impacted Black people and other marginalized communities. The historic White Rock Baptist Church congregation, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered a pivotal speech in 1960, was approaching its 150th anniversary in 2016. Our group of scholars and practitioners (eventually becoming the vMLK project team) had research agendas and scholarly background in visual and material rhetoric, rhetorics of the civil rights movement, and digital technologies. Our colleagues in the College of Design and a nearby video game studio expressed interest in working together interdisciplinarily. The NC State libraries offered technology spaces and staff support for developing community engaged projects. And our communication graduate students were excited about the prospect of rethinking rhetoric and public address in a digital age. As we began engaging in conversations and developing a partnership with White Rock Baptist Church congregation, the idea of recreating an opportune moment and thereby re-theorizing the ancient rhetorical concept of kairos in and for a digital age seemed a fitting response to all of these factors.

They included the following: can a public address – especially an historic instance of public address – be more than a fleeting, one and done experience? How can moments of communication, and particularly of public speeches that transform hearts and minds, be experienced and critically understood in and through their materiality? More specifically, how can we use digital technologies and resources to amplify this history, these voices, and these models for achieving transformation in civic life? How might we engage in shared experiences and productive conversations regarding history, race, civil rights and advocacy in an increasingly digital age?

The coming together of time, place, people/communities and communicative acts, as we have described it here thus far, illustrates the concept of kairos in a remarkably clear fashion. Ancient Greek has two words for time: Chronos – most recognizable as the root for chronology, i.e. linear time – and kairos. Kairos is loosely translated as “the right time” or opportune moment for decision or action. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a time when conditions are ‘right’ for the accomplishment of a crucial action.” Indeed, as suggested above, kairos, understood as an opportune moment, is foundational to classical understandings of public address and contemporary collective decision making.

In scholarly communities, the substance of kairos has been long debated. If kairos is an opportune moment, then is it possible to find/recognize these moments? And if so, how? Some classical rhetoricians (Bitzer) would have said opportune moments objectively exist, independent of any individuals or actions, as a distinct moment, “manifesting its own requirements and making demands on the rhetor” (Miller, 1992, pg. 312). Kairos, understood in this way, is a challenge of recognizing an opportune moment and the demands posed by it (through training and study in the rhetorical arts). But if the only hope for change/opportunity is to simply wait for a moment to arise, this leaves little room for agency in enacting conditions for such moments or, indeed, change.

So, if we do not simply find kairos, can we create it? Is it possible to create a condition of opportunity? Scholars taking a more social constructivist perspective (Vatz) have asserted that we fundamentally create any moment of opportunity as we communicate in everyday life. From this perspective, any moment/time has inherent potential for kairos. By deciding and even crafting (at least to some extent), the terms of success, an individual is able to develop and shape a situation because every moment is ripe with potential, especially if/when using the ‘right’ strategies extending from training in rhetoric. But this more agential perspective belies the fact that, among other things, positionality exists and that kairos, this “principle of timing or opportunity in rhetoric” (Miller 1992), is available/accessible/rendered/discoverable/crafted differently for people with different positionalities and capacities for agency.

A third perspective on opportune moments/kairos is helpful here. This perspective emphasizes temporal fluidity and distributed agency in ways that fit the distributed nature of both time and agency in a digital age. “Rather than positing a heroic speaker who delivers a killer argument” (Wells, 2022) that results in transformation, the digital age brings to the fore the themes of situation, positionality and contingency. Understanding that opportune moments are made up of complex situations that each person enters into and is able to engage with uniquely, represents a more nuanced and functional sense of kairos.

These three perspectives, 1) that opportune moments are objectively out there to be found and acted on, 2) that we create the conditions for opportune moments through our communicative acts and 3) that time and agency are always enmeshed in contexts and systems of power and position, are helpful in theorizing our work. Kairos is an interplay between circumstances in the world (community/place) and subjective moments of exerted/ing agency (i.e. timing and positionality). Opportune moments are not deterministically existing within the world, waiting to be discovered, nor are they fully able to be shaped by any individual using a set of rhetorical strategies. Kairotic or opportune moments, these moments where communicative change becomes possible, are contextual and tied to our identities whether understood as historical, political, material or symbolic. Certainly, there are objective realities that both constrain and enable us to communicate, but within those constraints/contexts we have the ability to engage/identify/communicate with others, with audiences/communities. A moment of opportunity may be possible but appears differently, in terms of access, context, engagement, etc. for individuals with different identities and positionalities.

The interplay between these perspectives is important to each of us as authors of this digital monograph and to all of the individuals who have contributed to and participated in the vMLK project. This project is centrally and essentially NOT any one person’s, not ours, nor the product of my/our labor – it is instead a living, breathing, collaboration put out into the world and sustained by a team of people, a community that has evolved, shifted, changed, broadened and expanded over time. And each of these individuals bring their positionality and agency to the project in ways that fundamentally impact the project. However, as indicated above, many times projects like this one are understood by others as necessarily connected to one or two “heroic” authors or notable individuals.

For instance, in a May 2018 story published in the Washington Post (“Is Technology Bringing History to Life or Distorting It?” by Steve Hendrix) ³ The vMLK Project is featured along with several other digital humanities initiatives in relation to “the groundbreaking and controversial ways that history is becoming less about dates and more about data ” and the way in which digital technologies make history “more visceral.” In the article, the advent of the vMLK project is described as follows:

This article places the role of agency (So she made one) squarely on me, Victoria Gallagher. In terms of my own positionality, I am what is referred to as the Principle Investigator/Lead Scholar for the vMLK project. I am also a white woman who grew up in the city of Detroit and have now lived in the U.S. South for over 35 years. I am a woman who directly and indirectly experienced the way race, gender and class shaped and reshaped my city(ies), the communities in which I grew up and in which I now live and work, and my relationships with classmates, neighbors, colleagues, family and friends.

Similarly, in 2023, WNBC-TV News reported on an exhibition of the vMLK project at Molloy University for local High School Students on Long Island. The news report stated that Dr. Max Renner brought his virtual project to nearly 200 students from Nassau County. The coverage from WNBC and several other local news outlets placed ownership of the project firmly on me, Max Renner. Although I, Max, am a Co-Principal Investigator for the vMLK Project, and am a cisgender gay white man from central Illinois now teaching in New York, this project is not mine. Growing up in Illinois and during the course of my academic career, I have seen the ways in which research has too often taken from communities, while offering little or nothing in return; an extractive tendency that allows discussions of projects and projects themselves to be seen as owned by researchers. It is our goal to contend with this extractive impulse intentionally by examining/foregrounding how agency works within this project and within this publication.

These attributions of agency, exemplified in and amplified by the media coverage above, mean that our individual motivations, privileges, backgrounds, expertises, and positions are essential to the project and to its power dynamics, to its contributions and consequences. Indeed, as authors of this monograph, we – Vicki and Max – are conscious that our identities as scholars and professors at institutions of higher education in the United States mean that moments of opportunity and of our agency in relation to crafting and/or responding to such moments, are unique to us individually and also fully enmeshed in larger systems of power relations and identity.

Recognizing/stating our positionalities as well as the capacity building goals of the project is, we hope, instructive. From the start, our goal was to build capacity for everyone on the project/production team and our partners as the project was developed iteratively over time during a critical 10 year period in the development of digital technologies. A more fulsome representation of the project and of the community who developed it is depicted in our acknowledgments section and a timeline of the 62+ contributors and contributions to the vMLK Project which captures the range of both. ⁴ From the collaborative efforts of the White Rock Baptist Church pastoral staff, its deacons and congregation members; to the remarkable design, technical, and theoretical work of Dr. Keon Pettiway; to the vision and innovative VR artistry of Dr. Derek Ham and Shadrick Addey; the historical and theoretical contributions of Drs. Kim Gallon, Nishani Frazier and Clayborne Carson and the oral history provided by Ms. Virginia Williams, building capacity through this project means centering Black people, their experiences, expertise and contributions and ensuring full agency in relation to the scope, goals, and trajectory of the project. As Susan Wells suggests, this kind of  heterogeneous and spacious understanding of agency in relation to positionality is at the heart of kairos (255-256) and illustrates the complex relations of environments and networks that support a kairotic practice (254).

As you explore this digital publication, we invite you to engage in your own discovery of the role of agency and positionality in relation to exploring and realizing opportune moments, in other words, in developing a kairotic practice that can sustain and transform you and your community. The publication is designed around the following sections, described briefly below and you have choices as to how to read and move through them.

Section one, Inception and Limits, introduces the theoretical underpinnings and the digital humanities vision of the project. We present the historical experience as a case study for examining the potential of ethical, publicly engaged recovery scholarship. As recovery is at the heart of Black DH scholarship, we speak into the inception of projects and how digital humanities scholarship can be productively enhanced by considering limits as well as opportunities.

Ultimately, we argue that any kind of historical recovery or recreation work has limits. But understanding the limitations (of historical contexts and of project goals) and foregrounding those limits, is a productive site for creation and critique. The vMLK project, as our example, is not an exact replica. We can’t make that, but there is something powerful about giving a sense of what it was like to be there, and foregrounding the historical contextualization — there is something powerful about understanding and working at the limits of kairotic technologies.

This section also provides answers to several key historical questions (such as why the speech was given in Durham rather than in Greensboro when it was given in response to the start of the Greensboro Sit-in). It incorporates the Counter Histories documentary of the 1957 Royal Seven Sit-in at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in Durham, NC and examines the historical debate about whether civil rights could best be achieved through the more traditional rhetorical means of preaching, letter writing, petitioning or through the more embodied means of direct nonviolent social action such as boycotts and sit-in. This historical contextualization involves the presentation of archival materials, including photographs that were taken at the White Rock Baptist Church on the night in 1960 when King gave his speech as well as the additional oral history of that night provided by Ms. Virginia Williams and others.

The second section, Cultivating Collaboration, details the collaborative and iterative nature of the project and provides a detailed account of the community conversations on the genesis of the project, the recreation event, the development of the audio recordings and the listening experiences, the development of the initial version of the project website and public exhibitions, and inclusive citational practices.

It includes access to the four different listening experiences and interview footage, along with interpretation and theoretical conceptualization in regard to engaging in digital humanities work that enacts equity. We argue that large scale digital humanities projects for the public are necessarily interdisciplinary and best enacted in and with communities. Specifically, we illuminate the importance of developing collaborative relationships with communities and stakeholders, showcasing how to work iteratively to respond to the priorities of community partners and organizations, and thereby find ways to enhance longevity, sustainability and accessibility.

Section 3, Crafting Public address as Experience, explores the development of the project exhibitions, particularly the exhibitions for students and faculty, driven by learning outcomes and an approach to learning we conceptualize as a digital pedagogy of civic engagement.

Specifically, we use analysis of audience response data to demonstrate how and to what extent embodied experiences of the vMLK Project encourage a readiness for civic engagement and, as a part of this argument, we provide readers/users of the anthology an experience of the locative, generative, and comparative functions of sound that help constitute that embodied experience. In this way, readers/users get to experience how the project situates audiences in a particular space and historical context, resulting in a form of cognitive attention that is conducive to reflection and that fosters a desire for civic engagement.

Section four further explores Kim Gallon’s conceptualization of technologies of recovery, focusing particularly on how place and location are interwoven into our experiences of opportune moments. These ideas are taken up and demonstrated by the development of the digital model of the church sanctuary where King gave his speech in 1960, based on limited plans and archival photographs, including photographs provided by the White Rock Baptist Church community. The section also explores urban renewal efforts that occurred on the heels of the gains in civil rights legislation, both in Durham, NC and across the United States and illustrates the significant ramifications for Black communities and churches and Black history. The section provides access to and concludes with an examination of both the low and high tech versions of the  vMLK simulation experience as means for making the project accessible for a wide variety of audiences in a wide variety of spaces, thereby enacting equity.

In the fifth section, Breaking and Creating, we argue that kairotic conditions may best be engaged/understood/experienced/re-created through breaking and creating (critique and production). This argument examines how scholarly and applied work in the fields of Design and Communication demonstrate a need for iterative engagement based in critique and production. As a part of this argument, we present an embedded 360 video of the VR experience and a downloadable version of the VR project build (for VR headsets).

Prototyping and rhetorical invention are key concepts illuminated and illustrated in this section as we tell the story of developing non-gaming based VR experiences during this critical period of digital technological development. This section illustrates the nature of the vMLK project as a recreation on purpose and explores how to design a project that enables us to ethically engage in an affective relation to history by simultaneously bearing witness to the past and engaging in witness with each other in the present.

Our sixth section, Putting the Public in Public Digital Humanities, returns to the public exhibitions of the project. Through the reflections of audience members, project team interviews, and White Rock Community interviews we consider best practices/considerations for the design, development, and assessment of digital projects working to enact technologies of recovery. Particularly, this chapter focuses on considerations for digital public humanities projects to enhance civic engagement and equity within both communities and within partnerships (which ideally have significant overlap).

We examine how the project was designed from the start to enact equity and engagement and illustrate the extent to which this has been accomplished based on the audience data collected at each exhibition. We also provide insights into assessing digital technologies of recovery as well as digital public humanities projects in general.

As we conclude this introduction, it may be helpful to take a brief moment to articulate what this digital publication is NOT.

It is NOT the website for the vMLK Project. That website was created, exists and has been in use for over 10 years, serving the vMLK project team, community members, NC State public speaking students and instructors along with professors and teachers of rhetoric, history, english, language arts, social studies, even AP geography, as a resource for accessing the project assets and resources, and for keeping up with the project phases and community exhibitions.

It is NOT a complete history or archive of the project. Much of the primary source material for such a history is readily available through the project website for future work along these lines. A complete archive of the project will reside in the NC State University Library special collections.

It is NOT a teaching manual for the project. While Opportune Moments is a rich digital publication for use by students, scholars and community members, the materials we have already developed for instructional use are readily available on the project website. Any new materials that we develop for use with this digital publication will be published with USC Press at a later date.

The vMLK Project is unique in the world of digital humanities projects for the public, in terms of its lifespan and its uptake by academic and non-academic communities. In this digital publication, we theorize, interpret and evaluate the key conceptual/theoretical, experiential and transformative consequences of the project.