The team behind NC State’s Virtual Martin Luther King (vMLK) project collaborated to create Experiencing King at NC State, which was open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hunt Library Saturday. 

The exhibition featured seven interactive stations that centered on King’s presence in North Carolina to showcase two speeches in particular, the “Fill Up the Jails” speech at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham and “A Creative Protest” at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount.

Upon hearing news of the exhibition, Bill Sharpe, a Duke alumnus and former director of the Wesley Foundation on Duke’s campus, came to see how NC State had recreated what he’d experienced in person years ago.

“I’m just so happy they’ve got this simulation of that speech at White Rock Baptist Church which is no longer there,” Sharpe said. “And I know there will be other speeches to follow this, but I’m just very happy that they are doing this project and this research, and it’s very authentic.”

The event was coordinated by NCSU Libraries, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Arts NC State/NC State Live and the African American Cultural Center. Multiple departments within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences including communication, history and English as well as the Department of Graphic Design and the School of Architecture contributed to the content exhibited throughout the weekend.

Walking tours led by NC State communication professor Victoria Gallagher and Eastern Michigan communication professor Keon Pettiway as well as Associate Head and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Jason Miller, took place from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 1-2:30 p.m. The tours started from the first station, the Art Wall, where historical photos of King speaking in NC were displayed in a rotating cycle accompanied by a brief textual introduction to the exhibit itself.

In addition to the seven main stations, the unveiling of an original painting, “Origin of the Dream,” by renowned artist Synthia Saint James took place in Duke Energy Hall at 12:30 p.m.

Immediately after the end of the second guided tour, David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of law and history at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, spoke to an audience, also in the Duke Energy Hall.

Station 2, located in the iPearl Immersion Theatre, featured short documentaries detailing the vMLK project, as well as the Royal Ice Cream sit-in that occurred in Durham on June 23, 1957.

David Hill from the School of Architecture was in the third-floor Game Lab to explain Station 3, a wall display of the digitally recreated White Rock Baptist Church interior. According to Hill, the original church was torn down in the ‘70s.

Using what little information they had about its size and layout, Hill and his team transformed what was merely a distant memory into a “rich spatial, visual and audio environment” of the church’s interior as it was photographed on the night of the speech: full of people, with the audio of King’s speech dominating the display. This project utilized video game software that also allowed visitors to step into the church to watch and listen to the speech via virtual reality headsets, which were provided outside the Game Lab.

“Our job really was to recreate an event,” Hill said. “And we had to recreate it because very little of [the history of] the event exists. We have photographs of the event and we also have the transcript of the speech itself, but we don’t even have the church anymore.”

Daniel Gallagher, a 2014 alumnus of communication and media technology, gave details about the software used to create the virtual reality.

“We’re using Oculus Rift [virtual reality] software,” Gallagher said. “This simulation was made in the Unity engine, and it’s still a work in progress. But it’s really neat. You can move around in the space. They tried to match it as much as possible to the photograph that we have from the time. The sound adjusts itself based on where you are in the space.”

Since no recording of the speech is known to exist, project members used the audio of the reenactment by voice actor Marvin Blanks, which took place at the current-day White Rock Baptist Church on June 8, 2014. A video of the full recording of Blanks’ performance can be found online.

Station 4 was a documentary detailing another speech King gave in North Carolina, in Rocky Mount at Booker T. Washington High School. The film was displayed on the Commons Wall on the third floor. On Nov. 27, 1962, King delivered his famous refrain, “I have a dream,” for the first time, almost a year before his speech preceding the March on Washington in 1963.

Station 5, located in the Teaching and Visualization Lab on the fourth floor allowed visitors to sit in different spots of the room, listen to the entire “Fill Up the Jails” speech and hear it as they would if they were in the actual church itself. A blown-up version of the original photograph from the speech was projected onto the walls so that visitors would get a sense of where they were located in the room.

“My convictions led me to invite 10 other students to go to White Rock Baptist Church when I heard Martin Luther King was coming to speak there, and this was just a week after the Greensboro four sit-in.”

Sharpe was referring to the first in the famous series of nonviolent sit-ins that took place in the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro.

“And so we had 11 white faces sitting in a cloud of black faces and we were sitting in just the third or fourth row,” Sharpe said. “It was very dramatic, of course, with his speaking, because he just has a way with words that no one else has ever had.”

Sharpe also spoke about his own emotions surrounding the events of that time. 

“It wasn’t that I was brave or anything like that,” Sharpe said. “It was kind of fearsome … I knew if my congregation at home knew this, they would probably almost disown me. One person in the group, a friend of mine, was one of the housing coordinators [at Duke] and he lost his position. He actually got fired because he was arrested that day. So there were consequences and we kind of knew there were consequences. But it was one of those things where your conscience and your spirit just dominated the fear. There was fear, but I guess love overcomes fear.”

Sharpe recalled that when King was killed, he was in the car with his family and could not show his honest reaction to the news in front of them.

“It was a very, very difficult situation because I realized that my family did not feel the way I felt. And that was not unusual. That was just the way most southern families felt at that time. But I felt that I would rather have been somewhere else, where I could express my grief with others who felt the way I did.”

Station 6, in the Creativity Studio, provided details about two NC State projects about King’s impact in North Carolina’s civil rights movement, as well as the rest of the country.

Finally, Station 7 in Duke Energy Hall gave visitors “an in-depth ‘look and listen’ of King’s First Dream,” the name given to King’s “A Creative Protest” speech.

Sharpe was very pleased with the project overall, and particularly with Station 5.

“I was actually standing where I was seated that night. And it did come back to me,” Sharpe said. “It gave me some chills to think about it, but it’s great to be able to look back at it, and it’s great to see progress has been made, although I daresay not enough progress. If I had looked at it at that time, I would have said, ‘Hey, a lot is going to happen.’ And a lot did happen. But it hasn’t happened nearly as fast or as thoroughly as it should have with [King’s] inspiration.”

Editor’s Note: Technician originally stated the event was coordinated by departments in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Graphic Design and the School of Architecture. While these units did contribute to the event, the coordinators of the event were NCSU Libraries, CHASS, Arts NC State/NC State Live and the African American Cultural Center.