Waitstill Hastings Sharp was a Unitarian minister who was involved in humanitarian work and social justice.
Background
Sharp, born in Boston in May 1902, was the son of naturalist author and professor Dallas Lore Sharp and Grace Hastings and a descendant of Thomas Hastings who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634.
Education
Boston University; Harvard Law School. Harvard University.
Career
He was a graduate of Boston University (1923), Harvard Law School (1926), and Harvard University (Master of Arts, 1931). While in his third year of law school he got to know Doctor Eugene Shippen, minister of Second Church in Boston. He became part-time director of religious education at Second Church and, later, through the support of Doctor Shippen, National Director of Religious Education for the American Unitarian Association (AUA).
Several years later, he was ordained a Unitarian minister.
In 1933 he took the pulpit of a small church in Meadville, Pennsylvania. In April 1936, he was appointed pastor at the Unitarian Church of Wellesley Hills in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
In the following year, Waitstill and Martha traveled to southern Europe to continue a relief and rescue program for endangered refugees as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee. While visiting southern France, Waitstill worked closely with the World Young Men’s Christian Association to help Czechoslovakian servicemen to escape from Vichy France.
Waitstill also forged a collaboration with Varian Fry to look after Fry"s refugee clients in Lisbon.
In this capacity, Waitstill personally escorted the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger from Marseille, France, to America. In 2006, Waitstill Sharp and Martha were named by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Nations. There is also an educational curriculum being used by several school systems, and an archive, including pieces featured at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The only scholarly book to describe the World World War II work of the Sharps, along with their collaborators, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2010: Susan Elisabeth Subak, Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis.
Membership
The Sharps were recruited by members of the American Unitarian Association, including Robert Dexter to accept a posting in Czechoslovakia, as representatives of a new program to help endangered refugees.