The Rev. William “Bill” Greason, a Montford Point Marine, Baptist minister and the oldest-living Major League Baseball player and last surviving Negro Leaguer, just turned 102.
Growing up in the Depression era Jim Crow South, Greason never let prejudice define him. Rather, he kept moving forward with dignity, humility, and a sense of humor, creating a legacy that began with one question: Did I help someone?
Before Greason teamed up in the Negro Leagues with Hall of Famer and U.S. Army veteran Willie Mays — and decades before he preached the Gospel from the pulpit — he was a Montford Point Marine, America’s first group of African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.
In 2012, Greason joined roughly 400 Montford Point Marines in Washington, D.C., to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Today, fewer than 400 Montford Point Marines survive among the 20,000 who served during the war.
Born in Atlanta on Sept. 3, 1924, Greason grew up across the street from Martin Luther King Jr. in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood bustling with Black-owned businesses, jazz and ragtime. His father, James, was a laborer, while his mother Lizzie took in laundry for white families.
Greason spoke with a whisper and chuckled about his circuitous path into baseball when he spoke to the author about his athletic legacy. He said, “I wanted to become a doctor and played two years of semi-pro football, but the Lord had other ideas for me, and I didn’t argue with him.”
To this day, he proudly wears a Marine Corps ballcap embroidered with the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor — a declaration that says, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
The first Black Marines
As war loomed and fascism rose across Europe, there were few opportunities for Blacks to serve in the U.S. military. That scenario changed six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, permitting Blacks to join the Marine Corps and any branch of the U.S. military — albeit segregated.
For a poor young man from Atlanta, this breakthrough signaled a chance.
At Booker T. Washington High School, Greason was an athlete and a budding leader. According to his military records, he captained the school’s softball team. He also participated in boxing, football, baseball, basketball, tennis and wrestling, so he was in fighting shape when he enlisted in the service in Macon, Georgia, at age 17 on May 13, 1943.
Greason soon found himself at a remote coastal North Carolina installation, built on swampy lowland behind a piney curtain, inhabited by snakes, bears and blood-thirsty swarms of deer flies and mosquitoes.
For Black Marines, Montford Point was their Parris Island, just on rougher terrain with fewer luxuries.
The first Montford Marines cleared the land with basic tools and saws in 1942. They laid gravel roads, dug latrines and built dozens of prefabricated huts, along with a mess hall, a chapel and supply warehouses to create a functioning Marine installation for thousands of men.
Montford Point would ultimately produce more than 20,000 Marines, including 13,000 who went on to serve in the Pacific during World War II.
Private Greason shipped out to the Pacific Theater with the 66th Supply Platoon, 34th Marine Depot Company, V Amphibious Corps. The men arrived on Iwo Jima several days after the initial invasion, when the island looked like a jagged moonscape choked with volcanic ash, smoke and blood.
His platoon’s job was one of the most dangerous on the beachfront — unloading heavy ammunition and critical supplies from ships onto the shore under the constant spray of enemy fire.
“Two of my best friends were killed on that island. I prayed and said, ‘Lord, if you get me off this island, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it,’” he told MLB in an interview.
Greason’s Iwo Jima
As U.S. forces prepared to land on the beach, Greason was instructed to move forward, no matter the casualties that surrounded them, and not tend to the wounded, according to Gerard Choucroun, the executive director of the Heart and Armor Foundation.
As they advanced onto the island, Greason saw that his best friend at Montford Point, Hubert “Claro” Duverney, a fellow squad leader from New York, and another good friend, James Wilkins, from Tennessee, had been hit by enemy fire. Cpl. Duverney was alive. As blood poured from his stomach, Greason made the choice to disobey orders and picked up his friend and carried him to the medical tent overrun with wounded and dying Marines.
Wilkins perished. His valor is memorialized with a Purple Heart. And despite Greason’s heroics, Duverney died two days later.
Greason spent 13 months in Japan with the American occupation force, where he was stationed in Sasebo and Nagasaki, after the United States leveled the city with the second atomic bomb. Choucroun recounts that his 102-year-old friend still dreams about being on the island.
On April 1, 1946, Greason was discharged from duty, yet he soon faced another battle — finding a job to come home to.
Though the young Marine was a capable leader with solid mechanical skills, trade jobs with decent wages were hard to find for Blacks, especially in the Jim Crow South.
So he turned to the Marines to find work as a ball player.
In a typed letter, received June 3, 1946, to his rehabilitation officer at the 6th Marine Reserves District, he wrote: “I am now unemployed. I would appreciate it very much if you could contact some team, it doesn’t matter where, but I am sure I have what it takes to make any team, and I would like a chance to prove myself, if given the chance.”
The age of athletic patriotism
Greason, never formally trained as a baseball player, calls baseball a “Gift from God.”
Standing five foot ten, weighing 170 pounds, the Marine was blessed with a strong arm, a quick mind and a relentless work ethic that soon landed him with the Nashville Black Vols in 1947, and the Birmingham Black Barons from 1948 to 1951.
As Greason perfected his fastball and scouts took note of his Major League potential, Greason once again put his potential on hold, joining the ranks of future Hall of Famers, including Marine combat pilots Ted Williams and Jerry Coleman, who left the game to serve in Korea. However, Greason’s war stayed closer to home this time.
Reflecting on his second tour of duty at Camp Lejeune, in an interview with The Oklahoman in 2012, Greason said he had a good camp commander, who said, ‘That’s a no-win war. You stay here. I’m going to have a baseball team.’”
During the Korean War, Camp Lejeune became a high-profile baseball hub for major and minor league talent who boosted morale. The Lejeune Leathernecks bested Fort Bragg, Cherry Point and Fort Jackson in America’s favorite pastime. Greason certainly delivered on the mound, winning all but one game, and even beating a team with Brooklyn Dodgers ace and future Hall of Famer Don Newcombe.
A barrier-breaking debut
After eight years in the Corps, Greason faced difficulties with team owners, reluctant to sign players who might get called back to duty.
On July 23, 1952, the pitcher once again wrote a letter to his superior officer with the 6th Marine Corps Reserve District, requesting acceptance of his resignation from the reserves.
In loopy cursive handwriting slanting to the left, Greason wrote, “I served proudly with the Corps. and would be glad to serve again if another need should arise, but I do not wish to make a career of it. As we say, once a Marine, always a Marine, therefore, there is no other outfit I would care to serve in if there was another war.”
The Marines released Greason on July 25, 1952. Just three days later the rookie broke the color barrier in professional sports as the first Black player for the Oklahoma City Indians of the Double-A Texas League.
The Marines cheered on their pitcher when he landed on the biggest stage of all, making history as the St. Louis Cardinals’ first Black pitcher in 1954.
There were 35,000 people in the stands at Wrigley Field on Memorial Day when the 29-year-old Marine pitched against the Chicago Cubs — the first game of a doubleheader. Greason could whip a wicked fastball. He could paint the corners of the strike zone but gave up a few runs in three innings, including Ernie Banks’ homer smashed onto the back row of the left field bleachers. The Cardinals lost the rain-shortened game, 14-4.
After finishing out his career with Cardinals farm teams and playing ball in Puerto Rico with Roberto Clemente, the first Latin American player enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Greason retired in 1959.
Greason and his wife Willie settled in Birmingham, where he drove a delivery truck for Pizitz Department Store and joined the 16th Street Baptist Church. On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, however, the Greasons weren’t in their usual spots in the church. As they headed to a baseball game in Tuscaloosa, they heard the distant “boom” of an explosion that killed four innocent young girls at their church.
That infamous Baptist Street Bombing signaled a spiritual turning point for the budding minister, who went on to receive a doctoral degree in divinity.
Did I help someone?
Whether holding a bayonet, a baseball or a Bible, Greason maintains the same quality — that of a consummate team player.
“I’ve been through a lot of stuff. I know nobody, but God brought me out,” he told the author in 2021. “No matter what happens in the world, nothing is impossible with God.”
Today Greason is a Veteran Ambassador for Heart and Armor, serving as a role model for veterans transitioning from difficult military service to civilian life.
“Reverend Greason has an astounding resume of achievement and citizenship. But his most inspiring qualities are his most subtle — humor and humility, said Choucroun. “Whatever uniform he wears — military, baseball or clergy — he plays for the team, not for himself. His personal warmth and longevity are indomitable. But these qualities are real and, when viewed up close, massively inspiring.”
Anne R. Keene writes about the age of Athletic Patriotism, celebrating athletes who served in World War II and the Korean War. She is the author of the wartime classic, “The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win WWII.”
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