Cultivating Collaboration

In his 2023 biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., King a Life, author Jonathan Eig recounts that a six-year old King told his family, “Just you wait and see, I’m going to get me some big words” (p. 36). As Eig illustrates, King grew up surrounded by the big words of preaching and theology and, similar to Frederick Douglass before him, had a passion for words, for reading, for writing and for speaking. As Eig writes about King in his early years,

Having also grown up in a pastor’s family in the city of Detroit, this description resonates with me (Vicki) in several key ways. I too grew up surrounded by preaching, theological discussions, church music and hymnody. I knew the liturgy – the sung congregational responses – by heart when I was just 2 years old. I often played church with my siblings both at our home and, most especially, at my great aunts’ home, which had a small organ in an alcove off the front room and a stair landing just three steps up from the front room. This landing made an ideal pulpit from which I preached “sermons” to my siblings, grandparents, and great aunts.

I relate these experiences from King’s life and from my own to emphasize something that is central to the vMLK Project and indeed to King’s 1960 “Creative Protest” speech. Specifically, while the project is named the Virtual Martin Luther King Project, thereby centering attention on Dr. King and his historic 1960 speech, it is simultaneously a project that reveals 
that preaching, advocacy and activism are never solely the activities or provenance of a single person, whether in a church pulpit, on an aunt’s staircase or in a public space. Rather, the project illustrates how preaching, advocacy and activism are always enacted in and with others, in and 
with communities.

As with preachers and theologians before him, King modeled his preaching, sometimes his very words, on those that came before him. 
He engaged in imitatio, the classical rhetorical practice of emulating, adapting, and reworking the discourses of earlier authors and speakers. Imitatio is not simply copying, but a creative process of engaging with 
and building upon established models to develop one’s own style and voice. It has been used in rhetorical education and the study of homiletics (the art of preaching) for centuries. And, it also sometimes occurs in situ in the homes of clergy members as children imitate their parents!

From the start, then, the development of the vMLK project was guided by our curiosity as to how digital technologies could enable the recreation or imitatio of historical events of public address, and specifically as Wells notes, “events in which agents in the past invoke and enable us (perhaps unwittingly) to create openings that will become available only in the future.” In so doing, we explore “the complexity and materiality of rhetorical practice, especially as it is technologically mediated and politically inflected” (pg. 253) and as it emerges from/within communities. Drawing from Wells, we argue that a kairotic rhetorical practice is NOT solely a result of the communicative actions of a single heroic rhetor, but rather it is within anyone’s capacity: anyone may awaken to the possibilities and engage in a creative protest in and with their community(ies). As Dr. Keon Pettiway, a contributor and co-PI on the project from 2014 through 2019 noted in an a 2014 interview, the vMLK Project “highlights that there were everyday people in Durham, North Carolina, students, people involved in religious organizations, who made a very great impact on our society and its civic innovation[s].” 
Dr. Pettiway went on to express his hope that what people would take from the vMLK project “is that a creative protest can be staged by anyone; you don’t have to be a King to do so.”

And indeed, the members of the White Rock Baptist Church and the larger Durham community provide a remarkable illustration of the way in which everyday people do remarkable things, showing regard for the past and anticipation of a future. The White Rock Baptist Church congregation was organized in 1866, one year after slavery was abolished in the United States and the same year that the first civil rights bill was passed by the Congress of the United States. The founder of the church was Mrs. Margaret Faucette who gathered a group of friends to meet regularly to pray and sing together. The congregation celebrated its 150th anniversary on October 21, 2016 with a festival service and banquette. The celebration was attended by the living descendants of Mrs. Faucette, current members of the congregation, and notable members of the Durham political and civil rights communities, including G.K. Butterfield and Floyd McKissick, Jr., the latter of whose father–Floyd McKissick, Sr.–assisted Rev. Moore in training the Greensboro students in 1960.  Over the course of its long and remarkable history in Durham, the church worshiped in multiple locations but the first brick building was completed in 1896. This structure, albeit renovated several times, was the building in which Dr. King gave his speech on the night of February 16, 1960 and serves as the basis for the visual depictions of the sanctuary for the vMLK project.

In addition to the aspects of time, agency and positionality, understanding kairos as an opportune moment that is recovered and reanimated through the vMLK Project also means taking seriously community, collaboration, and place. In terms of community and collaboration, we began with a conversation with the pastors and deacons at the White Rock Baptist Church, guided by the questions (the same questions we still consider together whenever we meet): how can this collaboration be useful and of value for White Rock? What do you want this project to look like/to be?

In the late 1960s, Durham city officials decided there was a need to connect the downtown city center with the growing suburbs and determined that they would build a freeway through parts of the historically black Hayti community in Durham. The White Rock Baptist Church sanctuary was in the middle of that community. It was slated for demolition and ultimately torn down in 1967. The congregation survived and built a new sanctuary at another location in Durham in 1971. That building was renovated and enlarged to the sanctuary where the June 8, 2014 vMLK re-creation of King’s speech took place.

Of course as researchers, we had questions and ideas about what the project could be like. We knew we were interested in a kind of recreation and recovery project, a creative process of engaging with and building upon established models (Imitatio). But, for us, this project could only work as a collaborative partnership between the White Rock community and our research team to the extent it enhanced agency for all involved. Specifically, members of the White Rock community and of our team needed to be able to determine what goals should guide the partnership from the outset and also, iteratively, moving forward. In this way, we began by enacting in 2013-14 what scholars in more recent years have identified as an essential characteristic of ethical approaches to developing successful communities of practice/partnerships (within and beyond digital humanities work), namely, allowing each contributor to shape and reshape goals/development of projects (Earhart 2022). ¹

For example, in our initial conversations about what the project would look like and what it would need to be and do, members of the White Rock community expressed the importance to them/their community of having the recreation include a recovery of their original sanctuary. The virtual recreation that resulted exists specifically because this was a primary goal that White Rock asked for the project to fulfill.

As we developed our collaboration with the White Rock Baptist Church community and worked alongside members of the congregation and the larger Durham community, we came to see how the vMLK Project materializes the oscillation between the significant impact of an individual speaker and the centrally important role of a community/ audience  in and through which transformation occurs, both at the moment in time when, and in the place/location where it was first enacted and today, in its reenactments.

In the case of the vMLK Project, the Listening Experiences serve to illuminate this oscillation. The four listening experiences were created from the mixing of the recordings made on the day of the recreation event, June 8, 2014 and the recordings made in a sound studio the day after that event. The sound recordings and the event itself came about due to a set of circumstances that are significant to the project and to understanding opportune moments that help to set the context for interpreting and experiencing King’s speech and the vMLK Project as a whole.

In May of 2013, I attended the International Communication Association in London, England to present research on visual and material rhetoric in relation to urban spaces and public parks. I was also the co-editor and one of the authors featured in the book, Communicative Cities in the 21st Century: Urban Communication Reader III, published that year by Peter Lang, London. On the plane back home to the U.S. from the conference, I happened to sit next to a young man who was the audio director for a North Carolina-based game studio, Red Storm Entertainment (now Ubisoft Red Storm). During the flight back to Raleigh, we got talking about the role of sound in immersive technologically mediated experiences. This young man was as interested as I was in the notion that while visuality was an important aspect of designing spaces and places, whether digital game worlds or physical location-based parks, sound was likely the most significant sense for immersing or locating someone in that space. During our wide ranging discussion, we also discovered that we were both amateur musicians which likely influenced our interest in sound. We exchanged contact information and promised to be in touch about how we might work together sometime in the future.

In the fall of 2013, NC State University opened the Hunt Library to much acclaim. The newest library in the NC State Libraries system was described at its opening as “the academic library with the widest array of technologies in the country.” It was the opening of this library and its technology spaces, including and most especially, the Teaching and Visualization Lab, that sparked the idea for what would become the vMLK Project. For ours was not the first large-scale historical recreation model that Hunt Library housed. An NC State colleague, Dr. John Wall developed a digital humanities project that premiered in the Teaching and Visualization Lab at Hunt Library in the fall of 2013. Dr. Wall’s “Virtual Paul’s Cross Project” features a digital recreation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon, given in London in 1622. It is a remarkable project, rich in its efforts to accurately and exactingly recreate the experience of hearing public preaching after the Reformation in the Paul’s Cross church yard in 1622.

Based on our conversation on the plane, I invited the Red Storm audio director to attend the premier of the Paul’s Cross project in the Teaching and Visualization Lab at Hunt Library and he did so. Interestingly, we both felt that while acoustically accurate and fascinating, the sound experience of Paul’s Cross was rhetorically and in terms of its immersive quality, less than compelling. The sermon was originally written and performed in old English and so was the recreated version. The recreated acoustics of the church yard were also accurately rendered historically to include all of the sounds/noise of the surrounding shops and homes from that time period. Needless to say, it was thus difficult for a contemporary audience to understand and appreciate the content of the sermon unless they were already familiar with the text and its significance in literary/church history. Additionally, due to inclement weather, Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon was actually given inside the church sanctuary on that day in 1622. These limitations of the “Virtual Paul’s Cross Project” helped us to envision what could be possible: we could recreate an auditory experience inside of a building no longer in existence by creating a digital model, allowing viewers/listeners to put themselves as closely as possible in the shoes of the original audience in 1960. And we could do it by taking a rhetorical, rather than literary or historical perspective, by centering the audiences and the communities in relation to the speaker both in the past and in the contemporary moment.

This initial inspiration regarding what the space and technology could bring into being reflects a unique aspect of kairos, wherein communicators take up aspects of the past, including those that participants were not aware of, and activate possibilities that were constructed but left dormant, in previous history. It utilizes contemporary technologies and their resultant new ways of making sound, VR, and immersive experiences that are anticipatory of civic action and advocacy in that future.

Our original plan called for a Martin Luther King, Jr. voice actor to perform “A Creative Protest” speech in a Raleigh studio so that we could have “dry” mixes to manipulate. Once the Red Storm audio director agreed to work on the project, we secured a speaker, Mr. Marvin Blanks, and engaged in conversations with the White Rock community. Everyone involved expressed enthusiastic support for the idea of a recreation event at the church including a live audience. So, on Sunday afternoon, June 8, 2014, Mr. Blanks enacted King’s speech for an audience of over 250 people. The event began with opening remarks by Pastor Reginald Van Stephens, continued with choral selections from the White Rock Church Choir, followed by introductions of special guests. As part of the introductions, one of the church deacons, Mr. Jenkins, welcomed all in attendance and invited them to actively listen and participate with the speaker. This resulted in a rich and diverse audio experience that more accurately reflected the church and its traditions. It is important to note, however, that the audience responses and participation were NOT scripted. They emerged as authentically as possible from an enthusiastic and engaged audience. The next day, Mr. Blanks performed the speech in the audio studio as well, giving us both “dry” recordings and “live” recordings with audience feedback. These recordings became the audio building blocks for the immersive experiences developed in the next phases of the project.

The response we received from the people who attended the recreation event were remarkably positive. They affirmed the extent to which Br. Blanks captured Dr. King’s vocal character and the importance of being together, with others, in community at the event in relation to their experience of the speech both as it might have been like in 1960 and as it was that day in 2014.