Josephine Amanda Groves Holloway, born on March 10, 1898, in Cowpens, South Carolina, was a determined pioneer who worked to ensure African-American girls had a place in the Girl Scouts.
The seventh of ten children born to Emma Gray Groves and Methodist minister John Wesley Groves, she was raised in a household that deeply valued education. After completing Brewer Normal School in Beaufort, she followed a teacher’s advice and enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville in 1919. Despite struggling with illness and finances, she earned a sociology degree in 1923, later adding a second bachelor’s degree in business from Tennessee A&I State College in 1926.
Her journey into Girl Scouting began soon after graduation, when she became the Girls’ Worker at the Bethlehem Center, a settlement house for at-risk women and girls. Inspired by the potential of Girl Scouting and trained by the founder Juliette Gordon Low herself, Holloway organized the first unofficial Black Girl Scout troop in Middle Tennessee in 1924…