10/03/2026
Girl Scouts have always risen to the challenge.
Josephine Holloway took her Black Girl Scouts out of Tennessee just to go camping. She had started the first Black Girl Scout troops in Middle Tennessee back in the 1920s. In the 1940s, the Girl Scout camps around Nashville still would not take her girls.
So where did they go, and did they ever get a camp of their own?
The answer starts in 1933, with a fight between Josephine and Nashville's Girl Scout council, the local group that ran the city's troops.
On June 6 that year, a committee of the council recommended rejecting her request for a troop. The council said no, citing cost: separate facilities for Black girls would cost too much.
Josephine's earlier troops had folded years before, so this was a new troop, with her oldest daughter, Nareda, in it. Nareda turned six that year.
So when the council talked about the cost of facilities for Black girls, one of those girls was Josephine's own child.
On June 22, one member of the council, Letitia Morgan, pushed back. Morgan told the council that segregation went against the Girl Scouts' own teachings and asked permission for two Black troops to form.
Morgan's request failed. Josephine was no beginner at Girl Scouting, and that makes the no harder to take.
Nine years earlier, in January 1924, Josephine had taken a Girl Scout training course at George Peabody College in Nashville. The course covered the Girl Scout laws and the Girl Scout promise.
Josephine was the only Black woman taking part.
Josephine trained with Juliette Gordon Low, the woman who founded the Girl Scouts, and came away a commissioned captain. That was what the Girl Scouts then called a troop leader.
Josephine was twenty-five at the time, and she had finished Fisk University, a Black college in Nashville, the summer before. Her college money had come from winding the clocks in the music practice rooms and mending the dining hall's tablecloths.
Josephine ran the girls' programs at the Bethlehem Center, a Nashville community house with a baby clinic and a kindergarten. By late 1924 she had ten troops going there, with more than 300 girls in them. Nashville would not have a Girl Scout council of its own until 1927.
Then, on June 30, 1925, she married Guerney Holloway, who ran the center's programs for boys. The center's director forced her to resign, because the director did not think it proper for a married woman to hold the job. That was how her earlier troops came to fold.
By 1933, Nashville's council was the one telling Josephine no, and she ran her troop without its permission. Nareda was in it, and Josephine's two younger daughters later joined too.
Josephine asked her friends to start troops of their own, and she kept pressing the council to recognize them. The answer did not change for ten years.
The council would not even let Josephine have the Girl Scout handbook.
So where does a troop the council refuses to register get its books? Josephine asked her husband, Guerney, who was studying to become a doctor in Chicago, to buy copies there.
Josephine asked the council one more time in October 1942. In May 1943 it finally said yes and approved her troop as Troop 200.
Nareda was sixteen by then.
The yes came with a limit. The council tried to hold Black girls to no more than a quarter of all the girls it enrolled.
Black Nashville showed up. In 1943, thirty-six Black volunteers signed up for training through the council, and by May 1944 the city had thirteen Black troops.
That was ten years of no, and within a year of the yes there were thirteen troops.
By 1944, Black girls made up 15 percent of the council's Girl Scouts. That year the council put Josephine on its payroll as a field advisor, the staff member who organized its Black troops. No Black professional had worked on its staff before her, and by 1946 she had forty troops.
Her girls were official Girl Scouts now.
The council even approved a plan to get park land where they could camp. The state parks board was afraid lawmakers would punish it for a camp for Black girls on state property, and no land was secured.
The camp that took them in those years was in Evansville, Indiana. If your grandmother camped with Josephine's girls, she may have made that trip.
In 1946 the Girl Scouts held their regional meeting for the South in Nashville, and the council opened it to Black and white leaders. Then the city's hotels would not give rooms to the Black leaders coming in. Josephine found them places to stay in people's homes around town.
They were welcome at the meeting and turned away by the hotels.
Around 1950, Josephine found about fifty acres near Millersville, north of Nashville, for a camp for Black Girl Scouts. The accounts disagree about who bought the land, Josephine or the council.
One detailed biography says the council did little to develop it.
So who got the camp ready? Josephine's scouts and their parents did, on weekends.
There was an old farmhouse on the land, falling apart. They cleared the overgrowth and laid out the roads and trails Josephine had planned.
Josephine tracked down some discarded army barracks. Members of a Fisk University fraternity helped haul them onto the land.
In 1933, the council had said separate facilities for Black girls would cost too much. Close to twenty years later, Black families were out clearing the ground for a Black girls' camp.
The camp's start is dated anywhere from 1951 to 1955, and it came to carry her name: Camp Holloway.
By the late 1950s, people were complaining that Camp Holloway was not up to par with the council's camps for white girls. In 1960 a pool finally went in. In 1962 the council ended its separate district for Black troops, which it called the "Negro" district, and Josephine retired the next year.
She had fought a long time to get her girls recognized. Years later, she had mixed feelings about the end of the separate Black troops. She said that putting Black and white troops together lessened her girls' exposure to "examples of black strength and pride."
In 1984, by one account, she and Guerney gave the camp forty acres of their own land beside it. Josephine Holloway died on December 7, 1988, at ninety.
Camp Holloway is still open, and girls of every race go there. Black families cleared its first ground on their own weekends, a generation after the council said separate facilities for Black girls cost too much.
Most of the people who did that work are not named in any account of her life I could find.
Her name is on the camp. The least any of us can do is know that they were there too.
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