Life After Baseball
After finishing his professional career in 1959 with Class AAA Rochester, Greason returned to Birmingham and drove a delivery truck for a department store.
He and his wife, Willie, whom he had met during his playing days, attended the 16th Street Baptist Church. On the horrific Sunday in 1963 when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the church, killing four girls, Greason was away playing semipro baseball.
One Sunday afterward, Greason recalled, “all of a sudden the Lord spoke to me from within. He said: ‘It’s time.’”
Greason, honoring the promise he had made in Iwo Jima, began studying for the ministry and preaching at the 16th Street Baptist Church. His sermons taught “human rights — the rights of people and the word of God,” remembered Shelley Stewart, then a disc jockey who has been called “the radio voice for the Birmingham civil rights movement.”
Greason became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in 1971. Overseeing a congregation of 1,000-plus members, Greason officiated ceremonies, led Bible classes, preached and counseled — “nurturing a whole generation up through childhood,” according to Mike Holt, a deacon at Bethel Baptist.
In the decades that have passed, nearly everyone who knew Greason as a ballplayer has died. Aside from a few books in his study — a Negro leagues encyclopedia; a worn paperback titled Baseball’s Forgotten Black Heroes — few visible clues connect him to his former life.
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