Laurie D. Willis

At 3 p.m. on Feb. 23, about 225 people gathered at the Millennium Center in downtown Winston-Salem for a vigil commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Winston-Salem sit-in. Organized by Wake Forest and Winston-Salem State universities, the event featured remarks by Wake Forest President Nathan O. Hatch and Winston-Salem State Chancellor Elwood L. Robinson, a keynote address by WFU Dean of the School of Divinity Jonathan L. Walton and music by The WSSU Singing Rams.

What can we learn from the past? Wake Forest University legal scholar and Associate Provost Kami Chavis explains, “If you want to have a transformative institutional change, you have to begin examining the past and the root causes of underlying issues to know what you need to do in the future.” Chavis is also co-chair of the Steering Committee of Wake Forest’s Slavery, Race and Memory Project.

When they moved into a women’s residence hall in 1969, Beth Norbrey Hopkins and Deborah Graves McFarlane simply wanted to obtain a good education and weren’t thinking about making history as the first African American women to come to Wake Forest as resident students. But they did.

On Feb. 1, Beth Norbrey Hopkins and four other African American women will talk candidly about their experiences at Wake Forest in the early 1970s. The 9 a.m. panel discussion in Brendle Recital Hall commemorates the 50-year anniversary of the integration of women’s residence halls at Wake Forest.

Ibram X. Kendi, a professor of history and international relations and founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, delivered the Martin Luther King Jr. keynote address inside Wait Chapel on Jan. 20.