10/13/2026
Two ASALH Branch Presidents Appointed to Virginia Task Force Preserving African American History
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger appointed Michelle Evans-Oliver and Dr. Joseph P. Boutte to the Commonwealth’s Task Force for the Identification of the History of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Virginia.
The work of identifying, preserving, and sharing African American history in Virginia is receiving renewed attention—and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) will have a meaningful presence in that work.
On August 10, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger announced the appointment of three Virginians to the Task Force for the Identification of the History of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Virginia: public historian and preservation strategist Michelle Evans Oliver of Henrico County, genealogist Karice Luck-Brimmer of Danville, and Dr. Joseph P. Boutte of Prince William County.
The appointments are especially significant for ASALH. Evans-Oliver and Boutte are both presidents of Virginia ASALH branches. Evans-Oliver leads the Our Ancestors Legacy Richmond Branch, which she founded, while Boutte serves as president of the Northern Virginia Branch of ASALH. ASALH's current branch directory identifies both among the organization's Virginia branch presidents.
Their appointments create an important connection between ASALH's longstanding mission of researching, preserving, interpreting, and disseminating African American history and a Commonwealth initiative charged by law with ensuring that the history of formerly enslaved African Americans in Virginia is identified and preserved for future generations.
A Mission Rooted in Virginia Law
The Task Force traces its origins to legislation enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 2017. Under § 23.1-2219 of the Code of Virginia, Virginia Humanities—legally the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities—is directed to identify the history of formerly enslaved African Americans in Virginia and determine ways to preserve that history for educational and cultural purposes. A 17-member Task Force was established to assist in carrying out that work.
The statutory mandate is unusually broad. It calls for Virginia to identify, preserve, and conserve historic sites connected to African American history; assess public and student knowledge of African American history, the African slave trade, slavery, and its continuing legacy; document African American contributions; inventory historic sites, memorials, exhibits, and resources; consider heritage tourism and economic development opportunities; develop a register of significant sites needing preservation; and build a statewide network of historians, educators, organizations, businesses, and speakers who can serve as educational resources.
The Task Force publicly launched at Fort Monroe in August 2018, at a place with extraordinary significance to the African American experience. Virginia Humanities subsequently described its mission as advancing inclusive learning, community development, and economic opportunity through the preservation of Virginia's Black cultural landscape. Its early work included community outreach, preservation initiatives, public programming, partnerships with state agencies and nonprofit organizations, and efforts to strengthen the capacity of grassroots organizations protecting African American historic places. That history provides the foundation for the Task Force's rejuvenated work today.
From Preservation to Public Engagement
The continuing mission extends well beyond preserving buildings. Virginia's law envisions an interconnected system of history, education, preservation, public engagement, and heritage tourism. A historic cemetery, school, church, freedom community, plantation landscape, family archive, oral history, or archaeological site is therefore not simply an artifact of the past. Each can become a source of scholarship, a classroom, a community asset, and a point of connection between generations.
This approach closely parallels the vision of ASALH founder Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Woodson understood that collecting historical information was only the beginning. History had to be researched, documented, interpreted, taught, and placed into the hands of communities.
That challenge remains particularly important for the history of formerly enslaved people. Their experiences frequently survive not in a single archive but scattered across property records, wills, court documents, business records, church registers, cemeteries, archaeological evidence, family collections, oral histories, and the landscapes where African Americans lived, worked, worshiped, created communities, and pursued freedom. The Task Force therefore has an opportunity to help connect those fragments into a more accessible statewide historical record.
ASALH Leadership at the Table
The appointments of Evans-Oliver and Boutte bring complementary perspectives to that effort. Michelle Evans-Oliver, president of ASALH's Our Ancestors Legacy Richmond Branch, is a public historian, financial historian, genealogical researcher, and preservation strategist. Her research interests have included pre-Civil War African American history, African American cemeteries, genealogy, the business and financial dimensions of slavery, and the use of emerging technologies in historical research. She has also participated in preservation initiatives and the Virginia Black Public History Summer Institute.
Dr. Joseph P. Boutte, president of the Northern Virginia Branch of ASALH, brings a systems-oriented perspective to historical education and community engagement. The Northern Virginia Branch was organized to strengthen the research, preservation, and promotion of Black history across a region rich with African American historic communities and resources, including Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Manassas, Prince William County, and communities such as Gum Springs and Dumfries.
Together, the two branch presidents also represent different geographic perspectives within the Commonwealth—Richmond and Central Virginia on one hand and the rapidly changing communities of Northern Virginia on the other.
Their appointments reflect something fundamental to ASALH's history: scholarship and public service need not occupy separate spaces. From Woodson's era to the present, ASALH members have worked not only to study African American history but also to build the institutions, archives, programs, partnerships, and public understanding necessary to sustain it.
A Rejuvenated Mission for the Years Ahead
The Task Force now has an opportunity to build upon its earlier work while responding to a changing historical and technological landscape. The next phase could strengthen the statewide inventory of African American cultural resources, identify endangered historic places, connect descendant communities with preservation resources, expand heritage tourism, strengthen partnerships with Virginia's HBCUs and historical organizations, and make historical information more accessible to teachers, students, researchers, families, and visitors.
Technology offers additional possibilities. Digital mapping, genealogy platforms, digitized archives, oral-history collections, geographic information systems, and responsible uses of artificial intelligence can help connect records that have long existed in separate institutional and family collections. But technology cannot replace community knowledge. Some of Virginia's most important African American history remains preserved in family Bibles, church records, cemeteries, photographs, deeds, community traditions, and the memories of elders. Finding and preserving that history will require collaboration among professional historians and archivists, genealogists, educators, preservationists, churches, local historical organizations, descendant communities, universities, museums, government agencies, and organizations such as ASALH.
In that sense, the Task Force's renewed mission is also an invitation. Virginia's African American history does not reside in one museum, archive, city, or historic site. It is embedded throughout the Commonwealth. The challenge is to identify those places and stories, connect them, preserve them, and make them accessible to generations yet to come.
For ASALH members, that mission should sound familiar. For more than a century, ASALH has carried forward Dr. Carter G. Woodson's conviction that African American history must be researched, preserved, taught, and shared. The appointments of Michelle Evans-Oliver and Joseph Boutte provide another avenue for that tradition of scholarship and service to contribute to the Commonwealth's work.
The Task Force's mandate began in legislation nearly a decade ago. Its work, however, remains unfinished—and increasingly important. The history is already here. The task before Virginia is to find it, preserve it, connect it, and ensure that it is never lost again.
