Island is prone to extreme weather such as typhoons. Under extreme natural conditions, it is easy to cause the operation of the island’s microgrid to malfunction, and even cause the island’s microgrid to collapse. When the island microgrid collapses, the black start is required to restore the entire system. However, due to the particularity of the island microgrid load, a large number of inductive loads based on asynchronous motors will affect the system voltage during the black start. In order to improve the efficiency of black start of island microgrid, this paper proposes a black start optimization strategy of island microgrid based on virtual active load. First, propose a black start power startup sequence optimization model, use the entropy weight method to evaluate the black start ability of different DGs, and restore DGs in time steps according to their evaluation value from high to low; then, propose load recovery at each time step The optimization model takes the maximum load recovery amount and the maximum load recovery importance as the goal, and uses the PSO algorithm to solve the corresponding load optimization model; then, the path recovery optimization model of each time step DG and load is proposed and the Prim of the minimum spanning tree is used Path optimization algorithm to solve. In addition, this paper also proposes a virtual active load construction method. In the black start process, it is considered that the inductive load and the parallel compensation capacitor are equivalent to the active load, thereby improving the black start success rate. Finally, the simplified 19-node microgrid structure is used as the test system for simulation verification. The simulation results show that, compared with the black start strategy that does not consider optimization, the method in this paper increases the load recovery by 33.8% during the black start process. The importance of restoring the load, and the total path restoration time is reduced by 54.9%, which improves the efficiency of the black start of the island microgrid. In addition, according to the virtual active load construction method proposed in this paper, the simulation results show that when the reactive power provided by the parallel capacitor is sufficient, the impact of the inductive load on the system voltage can be significantly reduced during the black start process.