Montgomery Officials Plan Civil Rights March In Metaverse

The 60^th anniversary of the historic Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches that culminated in the passing of the landmark Voting Rights Act, will be commemorated in March of 2025. As in previous years, many local activities will take place including the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Unlike years past though, Montgomery officials are planning to provide a unique opportunity for people from all over the United States and the world to be part of this momentous event through virtual participation in a metaverse.

If the plan is successful, this novel approach will enable the global community to engage, learn, and march alongside those on the ground to commemorate one of the most consequential civil right movements in history.

The Marches That Defined Modern America

In the spring of 1965, in an effort to ensure that African Americans could exercise their right to vote in resistance to decades of segregationist authority, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and other activists led a series of protest marches in Alabama.

During the weeks in which the marches occurred, many exceptionally courageous acts took place, from ordinary citizens to political leaders. Sadly, on several occasions, authorities acted with violence upon the peaceful marchers.

By March 25^th of that tumultuous spring, a final 5-day 54-mile march from the city of Selma to the State Capitol Building in Montgomery, which had swelled to 25,000 people, finally delivered a watershed moment for civil rights.

On August 6th of that year, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

Bringing The Anniversary To The World

The idea to use an immersive online space—a metaverse—to enable the world to participate in the 60^th anniversary of the civil rights marches started as a conversation about Montgomery’s economic revitalization efforts and how their cultural assets could be more broadly celebrated and inclusive.

Specifically, for the St. Jude to Montgomery trail, city officials wondered how to enable and expand participation for those, for example, with physical limitations or by local servicemembers deployed in another location. In addition, rather than holding the march commemoration just once a year, they began to ask how the experience could be observed and leveraged year-round.

Barry Gillespie, the national smart cities director at Performance Services—an architectural, engineering and construction management company already contracted with the city on other work—thought that an online virtual experience might work, but he needed to convince city officials and find a compelling solution.

As discussions developed, Gillespie found the city’s director of community development, Desmond Wilson, a local who as a child lived through the marches, enthusiastic about using the metaverse.

Mayor Reed, an innovation and technology advocate, also quickly recognized the potential benefits of the idea to the community and its unique ability to showcase and celebrate the history of the city. As a result he became a champion and has encouraged further exploration.

While the priority of the effort would be the march, city officials warmed to the possibility of a phase two that could catapult the city as pioneers in the metaverse by, for example, hosting businesses as an economics engine and by enabling the community to visualize and participate in the future development plans of the city.

A Metaverse Platform Worthy Of The Anniversary

As is often the case, some serendipity moved the idea forward. Around the same time, Gillespie received a sales call from Jason Shuster, co-founder and chief operations officer of BizzTech, a metaverse platform provider. Shuster’s pitch was that he believed their metaverse technology could enable the stakeholders of Gillespie’s firm to have a compelling visual and immersive experience of future architecture designs.

But then it hit Gillespie. BizzTech might just have the right technology to realize the Montgomery concept. Shuster concurred.

Gillespie and Shuster quickly met with the city, provided a demonstration, and the concept began to take shape.

BizzTech would build a photo realistic visual twin using Epic Game’s Unreal Engine software and host it on the city’s website using the company’s web-based metaverse platform. The scope of the city to be graphically rendered would be a 3.4 mile stretch between the city of St. Jude and the Alabama State Capitol Building that would include several significant landmarks such as Mt. Zion’s Church and they’d recreate notable buildings from that time that no longer existed.

Virtual marchers would be able to roam and explore areas off the trail, where educational resources would be available including the ability to converse with knowledgeable AI-enabled non-player characters (NPCs). Conceivably, teachers and their students in classrooms from Lagos to Sydney could engage with marchers and NPCs and glean substantial learning opportunities.

After the event, consistent with the desire for the experience to be on-going, anyone would be able to walk along the trail, engage with an NPC, and learn about important historical stories.

Can The Metaverse Deliver This Time?

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), announced a major push to enable the long-promised metaverse experience—some mix of The Matrix and Ready Player One—as a successor to the mobile Internet. This wouldn’t just be an enhanced version of, say, Second Life from the 1990s, but an immersive, persistent world offering compelling collaboration and economic opportunities.

Not long after, with billions of dollars spent by Zuckerberg and others, the vision failed and with it, the metaverse came to a grinding halt. Even Apple’s mixed reality headset, the VisionPro, despite all their clout and technological prowess, unsuccessfully inspired the market and are now rethinking their strategy.

However, versions of the metaverse have continued, particularly through gaming, and the notion of mixed reality has offerings in industries such as education and design, although use is mostly niche.

Cities have been more progressive than most industries in their metaverse and related digital twin experimentation, such as the launch of the CitiVerse, a European Union metaverse initiative.

Could Montgomery’s foray into the metaverse be more indicative of the technology’s value? BizzTech’s Shuster believes it is. After all, what other technology today, other than a metaverse, could deliver a similar educational and inclusive version of the civil rights march? Gillespie agrees that the Montgomery project may be the example that provides a proof point for the metaverse.

Wilson, Montgomery’s director of community development, thinks their work could inspire other communities. They are happy to be one of the first and believe their efforts may elevate the perception of Montgomery as a showcase city that embraces innovation and technology and one that can extract the metaverse’s potential economic value for the benefit of the community.

For the city, Wilson acknowledges the risks of trying out new technologies and the investment they are making. That said, he believes the potential educational, economic, and inclusiveness outcomes of bringing the 60^th anniversary of the civil rights march to the metaverse are much greater than any of the risks.

All involved will soon find out if this historic event can create history for the metaverse.