A "Forceful and Effective Leader"

A symposium celebrating the scholarship, intellectual legacy, and life of Reginald D. Butler

January 23, 2026

Minor Hall 125 and Warner Hall 209
The Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Please join the Carter G. Woodson Institute for a symposium in honor of Reginald D. Butler. The symposium is prompted by the recent publication of Dr. Butler’s influential, but never published manuscript, The Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community: Goochland County, Virginia, 1728-1832 (University of Virginia Press, 2025). The event will bring together the book’s editors and contributors Peter Onuf, Scot French, Robert Vernon and Joshua Rothman as well as former students, colleagues, collaborators, and loved ones at the University of Virginia and beyond.

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 as to white employers and officials.

Butler showed that community formation emerged in response to an oppressive, often violent regime of racial domination, yet it also depended on the critical role free Black people played in the local economy and their ability to sustain reciprocally beneficial working relations with their white neighbors. By reconstructing the lived experience of free Black families and the community they created at the neighborhood level, Butler’s revelatory study offers still fresh perspectives on race and slavery in the formative decades of Virginian and American history. Now this seminal work finally sees the light of day, accompanied by several framing essays that properly situate Butler’s foundational scholarship on free Black Americans in this still-burgeoning field.

Schedule
Time:	Topic:	Location:
9:00 AM - 9:45 AM	Continental Breakfast	Minor Hall Lobby
Panel 1: The Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community with book's contributors
9:45 AM - 10:00 AM	Opening Remarks	Minor Hall 125
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Panel 1	Minor 125
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Lunch	Minor Hall Lobby
Panel 2: Butler as Institution-Builder with UVA & other institutional mentees
1:15 PM - 2:45 PM	Panel 2	Warner Hall 209
2:45 PM - 3:10 PM	Coffee Break	Minor 110
Panel 3: Butler as a Person with family and friends
3:15 PM - 4:45 PM	Panel 3	Minor 125
4:45 PM - 5:00 PM	Closing Remarks	Minor 125
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM	Closing Reception	Minor Hall Lobby

Panelists

Opening & Closing Remarks:

Robert Trent Vinson, Commonwealth Professor of African American and African Studies, Director, The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies

Panel 1

Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus at the University of Virginia

Scot French, Director of Public History and Associate Professor of Digital and Public History at the University of Central Florida

Joshua Rothman, Professor of History and Interim Associate Provost for Academic & Administrative Affairs at the University of Alabama

Robert Vernon, Independent researcher, Central Virginia History Researchers

Nadine Zimmerli, Editor in Chief, Acquisitions Categories: History and Politics, University of Virginia Press

Panel 2

Andrea Douglas, Executive Director, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Claudrena Harold, Edward Stettinius Professor of History and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the University of Virginia

John Mason, Associate Professor, Co-Director, Holsinger Portrait Project at the University of Virginia

Corey Walker, Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the Program in African American Studies

Panel 3

Gertrude Fraser, Professor Emerita, Anthropology, the University of Virginia

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English at the University of Virginia

Reginald D. Butler family and friends: Rose Mari Mealy and Howard Butler

Additional Resources and Referenced Sources

Central Virginia History Researchers (CVHR)

Reginald D. Butler Local History Archive

Faded Contours

Central Virginia Court Records and Documents

Virginia Center for Digital History

America 250 In Color: The Mealy Family of Goochland, Virginia