When Professor Beth Hopkins walked onto Wake Forest University’s campus in 1969, she knew it would not be easy. She was attending not only to learn and earn her degree, but she would also do so while being one of the first two Black women to integrate the school’s dormitories.
Wake Forest University, which is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, announced earlier this year that a residence hall would be renamed in honor of Hopkins and her late husband, Larry Hopkins, M.D., a beloved physician and Wake Forest football star.
When Hopkins received the call informing her of the university’s decision, she was stunned. “I was speechless, and the tears just flowed,” she recalls. “I couldn’t even say thank you, because I was so overcome. I’m very pleased. I’m humbled by this.”
According to the professor, there were approximately 20 Black students on campus in the late 1960s. Even though the fight for civil rights had already begun to have an impact across the country at that time, they still had to endure both subtle and overt racism.
Hopkins recalls moments that have stayed with her for decades. The incidents ranged from a white student attempting to show Black students “how to use a toothbrush” to a professor who gave a Black student an F on an open-book test.
Through it all, the small community of Black students found refuge in what they called the Afro-American Lounge, which later became the Black Student Association. “We would gather there to discuss issues, cry together, and strategize together,” Hopkins says. “We would have vigorous arguments about how to proceed with a particular issue. We faced hostilities from some of the professors who felt like we weren’t academically prepared to be there.”
Hopkins credits Wake Forest’s president at the time, James Ralph Scales, for being an ally who helped the students through tumultuous times. Those experiences helped to reinforce her commitment to justice. After graduating in 1973, Beth earned a law degree from the College of William & Mary. She later joined the legendary civil rights attorney Oliver Hill, famous for his work on the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. From there, she served as a federal prosecutor, an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia, and an assistant U.S. Attorney.
In the 1980s, she returned to Wake Forest University to teach a course on race and the courts in the History Department. In 2010, she became the first director of the Smith Anderson Center for Community Outreach, a nationally recognized pro bono and public interest program.
This latest honor also celebrates the life and legacy of the professor’s husband, Larry Hopkins, M.D. At Wake Forest, Larry was not only a football star who scored the winning touchdown that led to the school’s first ACC football championship in 1970, but he was also the school’s first Black student to graduate with a degree in chemistry. After earning his medical degree, he returned to Winston-Salem to serve the community as a doctor.
“He delivered babies in the Winston-Salem community and was very devoted to patients, irrespective of their economic status,” Beth shares proudly. “He saw patients who could not pay, who had no Medicaid, and he helped to start a health center in a part of Winston-Salem that had the highest infant mortality rate in the state.”
For her, the dorm renaming is a testament to the community the Black students created during their time at Wake Forest. “My colleagues and I have been through a storm, and we are still standing. Even though my name and my husband’s sit at the top of the dormitory, it was the collective effort of all the Black students at that time. We banded together. We were unified because we believed in what the Constitution provided for us.”
The building that will bear the Hopkins’ names sits across from another dorm named for her late friend, Maya Angelou. “It is an honor to be next door to her, because she was such a beacon of light,” she says. “With these two dormitories in proximity to one another, we’re saying to the women of the world, you can do it too.”
Wake Forest University will host a ceremony celebrating the couple’s contributions and legacies on Saturday, October 25, 2025.
