And when it did occur, it was more smooth than we imagined it could.” “But I always felt that the Army would be integrated. “That obviously was not the optimum,” he said. Looking back on his career, Gregg said he started out in an Army that was split in two, “one Black and one white.” When he reported back to the Army two years later, it was as the deputy chief of staff, logistics. He received his second star, as major general, in 1976 and was promoted to lieutenant general the following year, becoming the director for logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. In the following years, he was placed in charge of all logistics for the Army in Europe. In 1972, he received his first star, becoming a brigadier general and being placed in command of the Army-Air Force Exchange System Europe in Munich. Thanks to the battalion’s extraordinary efforts, the unit was ready to go a month later, he said.Īfter his tour in Vietnam, Gregg returned home to attend the Army War College, after which he was sent to Germany for a third time. “So it became my responsibility, along with my officers and engineers, to get the battalion ready for deployment.” “The battalion was short on men and equipment and obviously … was not ready for deployment,” Gregg said. In the 1950s and 1960s, Gregg rose through the officer ranks at quartermaster units in South Korea, Japan and Germany and returned stateside for advanced training and to complete a business degree at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1964.Īfter a promotion to lieutenant colonel, Gregg was put in charge of the 96th Supply and Services Battalion at Fort Riley, Kan., which had been alerted for deployment to Vietnam. He stayed on at Fort Lee, where he was assigned as an instructor at the Quartermaster Leadership School, becoming the school’s operations officer. “Essentially, the main club on the base did not admit African Americans.” “At that time, there were two officers clubs,” Gregg, 94, said in an interview. In 1950, as a young second lieutenant at Fort Lee, he was refused entry into the base’s whites-only officer club. After serving as a supply sergeant in Germany, Gregg decided to reenlist and make the Army his career.ĭespite Truman’s July 1948 order, prejudice in the Jim Crow South persisted. He enlisted in 1946, two years before President Harry Truman signed an executive order to desegregate the military. Gregg was born in Florence, S.C., in 1928. Gregg enlisted when the military was still segregated Charity Adams joined the newly created Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942 and was the highest-ranking Black woman of World War II. Arthur Gregg, the first African American to achieve such a high rank, retired in 1981 after serving as the Army’s deputy chief of staff, logistics. The post is one of nine that the Pentagon has said will be redesignated to remove names, symbols or other displays that commemorate the Confederacy. Army’s Virginia garrison named after the slave-holding leader of Confederate forces during the Civil War, will become Fort Gregg-Adams on Thursday following a ceremony to rename the base after two Black officers whose struggles paved the way for a more inclusive military.
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