The Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community

A long-awaited work by one of the deans of Black studies Reginald Butler, the second director of UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, wrote an influential and much-cited but never published dissertation at Johns Hopkins University that focused on community formation among the free Black population of Virginia. His innovative and meticulous research in county and state archives enabled him to reconstruct the ties that bound free Black Virginians to each other and their enslaved neighbors, as well a