Seth Sharpe, Eagle Scout
As this is Black History month, we would be remiss if we let the entire month pass without making SOME observation specific to African American gains in Scouting. As we have discussed before, from approximately 1930 to the mid-1950s, the Council ran a segregated Scouting Division, eventually known as the J. C. Napier Division, named after famed Nashville African American businessman and politician James Carroll Napier. Eventually, we should do a post on Napier!
But this week, we want to look briefly at the Division itself. The Napier division was never particularly large. Most of the troops were from the “black part of town,” which at the time was around Capitol Hill. The Division office for years was run out of the studios of African American photographer George Anderson, who (by the way) was the first black man to receive the Silver Beaver in Nashville for his work as the Napier Division Commissioner (1948). Anderson’s studio was on Cedar Street, which is today Charlotte Avenue.
All of this is to say that by December 1944, the Napier Division announced it’s first Eagle Scout, Seth Sharpe of Troop 72. We know very little about Sharpe. He participated in Nashville’s Youth Day in Government in 1945 as Assistant Director of Education and graduated from Pearl High School in 1947. That’s about it. Mr. Sharpe received the award at the division-wide Court of Honor held at the Morris Memorial Building (today 330 Charlotte Ave). As far as we know, Sharpe was the first black Eagle Scout in Middle Tennessee. We have no photo, just the attached note from the Nashville Tennessean on December 10.
W. H. Shackleford, “Happenings Among Colored People,” Nashville Tennessean (Nashville, TN), December 10, 1944, sec. C, 8. “Napier Scouts.’
