Sanford D. Bishop, Jr.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor my dear friend, Attorney Virgil L. Adams of Macon, Georgia, upon his selection by the Central Georgia Council, Boy Scouts of America, to receive its Distinguished Citizen Award--an honor reserved for those whose service has made Middle Georgia a better place to live, to work, and to raise a child.

Mr. Speaker, Virgil Adams is a son of Macon. He is also a proud son of Albany State University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1977 with a degree in psychology before earning his Juris Doctor from the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University in 1980. He began his legal career as an Assistant District Attorney for the Macon Judicial Circuit, where he tried some of the most serious cases in that community, and in 1987 he entered private practice. Today he is a partner in the firm of Adams, Jordan and Herrington, P.C., with offices in Macon, Milledgeville, and Albany, where he has spent four decades standing beside families who suffered catastrophic loss and had nowhere else to turn. He also served for many years as County Attorney for Bibb County.

Mr. Speaker, the legal profession has taken careful notice of him. He was named Lawyer of the Year by the Macon Bar Association in 2001. He has held Martindale-Hubbell's highest AV rating throughout his career, has been named a Super Lawyer since 2012, and has been recognized among the Top 100 Trial Lawyers by the National Trial Lawyers Association. He served on the Board of Governors of the State Bar of Georgia, which honored him for his leadership in 2014 and presented him its Tradition of Excellence Award in 2020. In 2017 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers--an honor extended by invitation only--and in 2023 he was appointed Chairman of its Georgia State Committee. In 2025, the Macon Bar Association presented him with the Judge William Augustus Bootle Professionalism Award. But Mr. Speaker, the Boy Scouts did not choose him for what hangs on his wall. They chose him because of a small chair in an elementary school classroom.

Through the 100 Black Men of Macon-Middle Georgia, of which he is a charter member, Virgil Adams mentors students at Bruce Elementary School. So it is that a man who has stood before juries in cases of life and death, a man whose calendar is claimed by trustees and boards and bar associations across this state, will fold himself into a chair built for a seven-year-old and read a book out loud, one page at a time, and listen while a child reads it back to him. That child does not know he is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. That child does not know what an AV rating is. That child knows only that a grown man came, that he sat down, and that he came back again the next time. Mr. Speaker, the Scout Oath asks a young person to promise ``to help other people at all times.'' Virgil Adams has been keeping that promise in Middle Georgia for 40 years, and he has kept it most faithfully where no camera was rolling and no fee was charged.

He has given that same measure of himself to NewTown Macon, to the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, which he chaired, to the Board of Trustees of Mercer University, to the Albany State University Foundation, to Middle Georgia Justice, to Macon Hope, and to First Tee--Middle Georgia. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. And together with his wife, Paula Shipp Adams, a retired educator, he has invested in the Otis Redding Center for the Arts--so that in the city that gave the world Otis Redding, another Macon child with a gift and no other door might find one open.

Mr. Speaker, the bar of this state has taken notice of that work as well. Virgil Adams was recently presented the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 26th Annual Justice Robert Benham Awards for Community Service--the highest recognition conferred through those awards. The Benham Awards were established in 1997 by the Executive Committee of the State Bar of Georgia to honor lawyers and judges who have made outstanding contributions in service to their communities, and they

carry the name of the Honorable Robert Benham, who in 1989 became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court of Georgia and who served as its Chief Justice from 1995 to 2001.

Mr. Speaker, that is a fitting name to attach to this man's life. Justice Benham reached a place on that Court where no one who looked like him had ever stood, and he spent his years there making certain he would note the last. Virgil Adams has done the same work in the courtrooms of Middle Georgia. He earned an award given in Justice Benham's name the only way it can be earned--not by what he has won, but by what he has given away.

Mr. Speaker, the founder of Albany State University, Dr. Joseph Winthrop Holley, gave his memoir a title that has outlived him: ``You Can't Build a Chimney from the Top'' Dr. Holley opened that school in 1903 with almost nothing, in a Georgia that had no intention of helping him, because he understood that anything built to stand must be built from the bottom--one stone, one child, one year at a time. Virgil Adams is what that chimney looks like when it is finished. To his everlasting credit, he keeps climbing back down to the bottom to lay stone for somebody else.

Mr. Speaker, I have known Virgil Adams a long time, and I can tell this House that the honor he receives tonight is not the beginning of his service. It is only Middle Georgia's belated way of saying thank you.

Therefore, Mr Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in congratulating Attorney Virgil L. Adams upon receiving the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Central Georgia Council, Boy Scouts of America, and upon his recognition with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 26th Annual Justice Robert Benham Awards for Community Service, in thanking Paula and their family for sharing him with us, and in wishing him continued success in all his future endeavors.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Albany Technical College of Albany, Georgia, on the occasion of its 65th anniversary.

Mr. Speaker, in 1961 this institution opened its doors as the Monroe Area Vocational Technical School with 175 students. One hundred seventy-five. In a segregated South Georgia, in a year when very few people in authority believed that the children of sharecroppers and mill hands and domestic workers needed anything more than a strong back, somebody in Albany, Georgia, decided otherwise.

The Albany Area Vocational-Technical School followed shortly after, and in 1972 the two schools were joined together at the campus the college occupies today. In July of 1988, with the formation of what is now the Technical College System of Georgia, the school became Albany Technical Institute and was charged with serving a seven-county region--Baker, Calhoun, Clay, Dougherty, Lee, Randolph, and Terrell-- some of the most rural and most economically challenged counties in the United States of America. And on July 6, 2000, having met the standard set by the General Assembly in House Bill 1187 to award the associate degree, Albany Technical Institute became Albany Technical College.

Mr. Speaker, 65 years is a long time to keep a promise. It has been kept by every person who ever led this institution by President Howard Water, by President Wayne Israel, by President Nathaniel Cross, by President Alvin Anderson, by President Dr. Anthony O. Parker, and today by Dr. Emmett L. Griswold--and by every instructor who ever stood in a shop with a clipboard and refused to let a student quit.

Mr. Speaker, you cannot tell the story of this college without telling the story of two men.

Dr. Anthony O. Parker became the fifth president of Albany Technical College in 1995, arriving in a community still digging itself out from the great flood of 1994, and he led the rebuilding. He stayed for 27 years--the longest-serving president in the history of the college and the longest-serving president in the entire Technical College System of Georgia. He built the enrollment. He built the buildings. He built partnerships with the Marine Corps Logistics Base and with industry across this region. He was among the first technical college presidents in Georgia to raise a million dollars in private money for his campus. And he never stopped fighting for adult learners--for the grown man and the grown woman who walked in for a GED and walked out with a career.

Mr. Speaker, in November of 2011, I stood on that campus as Albany Tech dedicated its new library and media center in Dr. Parker's honor. I read a tribute to him into this very Record that day, and I presented him a flag that had flown over this Capitol in his name. He told us then why that building meant what it meant to him: his mother had been a librarian, and as a boy he was made to stop at the county library and study on his way home before he was ever allowed to go outside and play. He said that at the time he did not appreciate it. He said that he had come to appreciate it very much.

Mr. Speaker, on the morning of June 6, 2022, Dr. Anthony Parker passed away. He was 69 years old. He did not retire. He did not slow down. He had plans on the books for the next 5 years. He simply did not come to work one morning, and Southwest Georgia has not stopped missing him since.

Here, Mr. Speaker, is the part of this story that I want the House to hear.

In 2004, a man named Emmett Griswold walked through the front door of Albany Technical College to teach criminal justice. He had come out of law enforcement and corrections--a probation and parole officer for the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice, a deputy warden for the Georgia Department of Corrections--a man whose working life had been spent among people the world had already given up on. He was a native of Milledgeville who had made Albany his home.

He held his bachelor's and master's degrees from Albany State University, and he would go on to earn his doctorate from Valdosta State.

Dr. Parker took him under his wing. And Dr. Griswold rose--department chairman, dean of academic affairs, vice president for academic affairs, executive vice president--every rung of it, at the same institution, for 18 years.

When the college lost its president without warning, Albany Tech did not have to look outside for somebody to carry it. He was already there. On November 1, 2022, Dr. Emmett L. Griswold became the sixth president of Albany Technical College, standing on the foundation laid by his mentor and his friend.

Mr. Speaker, that is what 65 years of an institution actually looks like. Not a building. Not a seal. A man who taught, mentored, and believed in another man--who then took up the same work and kept the doors open for the next one.

Those doors, Mr. Speaker, have never asked a single student what their father did for a living. They have opened for the single mother working nights. For the man laid off at 45 who had to start over. For the young person nobody expected anything from, who is today a lineman, a nurse, a welder, a diesel technician, a logistics specialist--who owns a home, pays taxes, and raises children who will never know what it was to go without.

That is the harvest of 65 years in Southwest Georgia.

Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Albany Technical College on sixty-fiye years of service, in commending President Emmett L. Griswold, his faculty, his staff, and his Board of Directors, in honoring the memory of Dr. Anthony O. Parker and all who led before him, and in wishing this great institution many more years of transforming lives across Southwest Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a remarkable daughter of the State of Georgia, Ms. Johnnie Brooks Booker of Atlanta, on the occasion of her 85th birthday. A celebration of her birthday was held on Saturday, September 12, 2026, at the Whitley Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, Johnnie Brooks was born on July 31, 1941, in Forsyth, Georgia, to Willie Floyd Brooks and Lillian Goodwyne Brooks Graves. I would ask this House to sit with that date for a moment. Nineteen forty-one. In Georgia. A Black girl, born in a small middle Georgia town, into a state that had already written her ceiling before she drew her first breath--a state where she could not have been served at a lunch counter in her own hometown, could not have used the front door of most buildings on Main Street, and could not have expected the country of her birth to make room for her. Nobody asked that child what she intended to do about it. She told them anyway.

She went to Hampton Institute in Virginia and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in social sciences and sociology. She went on to the Atlanta University School of Social Work--now Clark Atlanta University--and earned her Master of Social Work in community organization. And then, Mr. Speaker, she went to work, and she did not stop for sixty years.

She began with the New York Department of Welfare. She taught in the Manpower Development and Training Program in Washington, D.C. and joined the D.C. Department of Rehabilitation in 1964. She served with the Neighborhood Youth Corps. She worked with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, then the Western Regional Office of the National Urban League, and then the Urban League's Washington Bureau.

She entered the federal service at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board as Director of Consumer Affairs and Civil Rights. In 1989 she was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1991, she joined the Resolution Trust Corporation as Vice President of the Division of Minority and Women`s Programs. When that agency closed its doors, she moved to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity, where she served until her retirement in 1996.

Mr. Speaker, I want my colleagues to notice something about that list. Consumer Affairs and Civil Rights. Minority and women's programs. Equal Opportunity. Community Organization. Look at every title she ever held. That woman spent her entire working life standing in doorways and holding them open for people who were never supposed to get through.

Mr. Speaker, the late Shirley Chisholm sat in this very House, and she left behind a line that the women who came after her have carried like a lantern: ``if they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.''

Johnnie Brooks Booker heard that. But she was never once satisfied to bring a single chair for herself. She brought them by the truckload. She set them up around the table. She called in people whose names were nowhere on the invitation--and then she taught them how to sit there like they belonged, because they did. She was not finished.

In 2001 she came home to Georgia and became the Global Director of Supplier Diversity at The Coca-Cola Company, where she served for a decade. In that role she built a mentoring program for minority- and women-owned business enterprises because she understood that a contract without capacity is a courtesy, and she was never interested in courtesies. She wanted those firms to be able to bid the next job, and the one after that, without her. Mr. Speaker, in 2007, came the moment I want this House to remember.

When The World of Coca-Cola Museum was built in Atlanta--that great glass house where one of the most famous American companies on earth tells the story of itself--Johnnie Brooks Booker made certain that minority developers and minority contractors were in the room, on the plans, and on that job site.

Think about what that means. A little girl born in Forsyth, Georgia, in 1941, who as a child that could not walk into a drugstore in her own town and sit down and order a CocaCola--that same woman, 66 years later, helped decide who would build the house that Coca-Cola tells its story in.

Mr. Speaker, that is not irony. That is what a life of purpose looks like from the far end of it.

She retired from Coca-Cola in 2012, at an age when most people are owed their rest, and promptly founded The Johnnie Booker Group, where she serves as President and Chief Executive Officer to this day.

Her service has extended to the American Society for Public Administration, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, The Links, Incorporated, the National Council of Negro Women, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Hampton University Alumni Association, the Utopian Literary Club, and Circle-Let's of Atlanta. She has served on the boards of the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, Women in Housing and Finance, Women of Washington, the Delta Research and Educational Foundation--the philanthropic arm of her beloved sorority--and the Fort Valley State University Foundation--an institution in the district I am privileged to represent, and one more place where she invested herself in young people she would never meet.

She has been recognized with two Congressional Resolutions of this House, named Hampton University Alumna of the Year in 2009, and honored with the Community Service Award of the Black Law Students Association at Quinnipiac University in 2022. In 2023,

she sat for an oral history with The History Makers--so that her voice will still be telling this story long after all of us in this Chamber have finished ours.

Mr. Speaker, she is the mother of S. Courtney Booker, III and the grandmother of Dalyn and Aiden. I would say this to those two grandchildren: the world will tell them a great many things about what they can and cannot become. Their grandmother has already proven every one of them wrong. They come from somebody.

Mr. Speaker, on the 31st of July, Ms. Johnnie Brooks Booker turned 85 years old. She has lived long enough to see a great deal of what she fought for, and she is still at her desk. Georgia gave her to the Nation, and she has spent 85 years giving back more than she ever received.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife, Vivian, and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in wishing a happy 85th birthday to Ms. Johnnie Brooks Booker of Atlanta, Georgia, in thanking her for a lifetime of extraordinary service to this country, and in wishing her continued health, joy, and many more years among the people who love her.