Arthur J. Gregg, Trailblazing Army Officer, Is Dead at 96
Arthur J. Gregg, the first African American Army officer to reach the rank of lieutenant general and the only person in modern history to have a military base named for him in his lifetime, died on Aug. 22. He was 96.
The Army announced the death on its website, but did not cite a cause or say where he died.
In April 2023, Fort Lee in Virginia was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams in honor of General Gregg, who in 1977 became the Army’s first Black three-star general, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley, who was the highest-ranking Black woman to serve as an Army officer in World War II.
The new name was recommended by a congressional commission charged with rechristening nine military bases named for Confederate officers, as part of a national self-examination around race set off by the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Fort Lee was named for Robert E. Lee, one of eight Virginians at the outbreak of the Civil War who were West Point graduates and U.S. Army colonels. Among them, the renaming commission noted, only Lee chose to take up arms against the United States. “The main difference” separating Lee from the others “was that Lee and his family enslaved other humans,” the commission’s report stated.
Fort Gregg-Adams, about 30 miles south of Richmond, has long been a hub of Army logistics, the field in which General Gregg made his 35-year military career. He commanded a 3,700-soldier logistics battalion in Vietnam, based in Cam Ranh Bay, and rose to be deputy chief of staff for logistics for the Army, overseeing support services around the world.
He was posted to Fort Lee as a young officer in 1950 to train in logistics. Although President Harry S. Truman had ordered the desegregation of the military two years earlier, the facts on the ground had changed little.
“We had two armies, one Black, one white,” General Gregg recalled last year in an interview with The Washington Post.
A training manual used by quartermasters at the time instructed them to compute the ability of Army units to complete a task based on whether the units were all white, all Black or composed of Black soldiers and led by a white officer.
General Gregg ignored the racist manual, according to an oral history of his life he recorded for the U.S. Army War College.
Military logistics was not his first choice as a career path. Growing up in poverty in the rural South, one of nine children in a home without indoor plumbing or electricity, he had hoped to work as a technician in a medical lab.
At 17, he completed a training course at the Chicago College of Medical Technology and got a job in a city hospital. But he was told he could not visit the bedsides of white patients.
He quit and enlisted in the Army in 1946, hoping it would offer a path to a medical tech job. Sent to occupied Germany, he was told there were no jobs for Black soldiers in medical facilities; instead, he was assigned to an all-Black unit of the Quartermaster Corps.
It was a role he ended up embracing: He advanced to sergeant at 18 and, after completing officer candidate school, became an instructor at the Quartermaster Leadership School at Fort Lee.
The commission that eventually recommended the renaming of Fort Lee in General Gregg’s honor noted that while Army support services, including the Quartermaster Corps, broadly known as “sustainment,” might not be the military’s most prestigious field, it had an illustrious history dating to the Civil War.
“Behind every rightly heralded story of battlefield bravery lies the often overlooked story of how Army sustainment professionals brought fellow troops the bullets, food, water, gasoline, armor, and — in recent years — networking services that sustain them in battles on behalf of the United States,” the commission wrote.
Arthur James Gregg was born on May 11, 1928, outside Florence, S.C. He was the youngest child of Robert and Ethel Gregg, subsistence farmers who grew cotton and tobacco and raised livestock on 100 acres.
Besides helping on the farm, Arthur walked three miles to a small, rudely built segregated school.
“The white children had a consolidated, very modern brick school and were provided with bus transportation from their homes,” General Gregg recalled in an interview published on the Army’s website in 2023. “It was a different situation based on race at that time.”
His mother died when he was 11, and he went to live with an older brother in Newport News, Va., where he attended Huntington High School.
He added to his academic credentials once in the Army, earning a degree in business administration from St. Benedict’s College (now part of Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kan., in 1965. He graduated from the Army War College in 1968.
His wife, Charlene (McDaniel) Gregg, died in 2006, and his daughter Sandra Gregg died in 2009. His survivors include another daughter, Alicia Collier, and three grandchildren.
General Gregg was awarded his first star in 1972, when he was promoted to brigadier general. The next year he was sent to Munich, where he oversaw the Army and Air Force Exchange System, the network of stores and restaurants on military bases.
He was promoted to major general in 1976. The next year, President Jimmy Carter named him logistics director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved his promotion to lieutenant general.
He went on to become deputy chief of staff for logistics for the Army. In that post, the Army’s highest logistics job, he was responsible for support services around the world.
He retired in 1981.
General Gregg lived to see Fort Lee rechristened Fort Gregg-Adams. At the time he said that despite the barriers he had faced growing up in the Jim Crow South, in the segregated military and in the imperfect transition to an integrated Army, he “always believed there were opportunities.”
“Even though you realized they were limited by race to a large degree, they were still there,” he said. “Frankly, I tended to dwell on the possibilities and did not become bitter.”