GIA (1948-70)
CLASS OF 2024 INDUCTEES
George Atkinson
Johnson (Savannah) High School Graduate
George Atkinson was an 11-year NFL player and two-time Pro Bowl performer for the Oakland Raiders. He led Sol C. Johnson High of Savannah to the GIA Class AA championship game in 1963 in the school’s fifth year of existence. Johnson’s football teams were 21-6-2 over Atkinson’s final three seasons. With SEC schools not recruiting African American players at the time, Atkinson signed with Atlanta’s Morris Brown College and became a four-year starter playing receiver and safety. The Raiders drafted the speedy Atkinson in the seventh round, and the defensive back was the 1968 AFL Defensive Rookie of the Year. He was boosted by his 802 return yards. He would have 3,681 all-purpose yards in his career, but he was best known as the strong safety nicknamed “Hitman” in the Raiders’ Soul Patrol secondary that included cornerbacks Willie Brown and Skip Thomas and free safety Jack Tatum. They were the first all-black starting secondary in NFL history. The Raiders won more games (10.6 per season) in Atkinson’s 10 years as a starter (1968-77) than any other NFL team. The Raiders’ 1976 Super Bowl-winning team went 16-1. Atkinson is currently a Raiders broadcaster who does pregame and postgame shows. Atkinson was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 2020 and was a finalist for the Black College Football Hall of Fame in 2024.
Tommy Hart
Ballard-Hudson High School Graduate
Tommy Hart was a 14-year NFL veteran and an All-Pro defensive end as a player and a three-time Super Bowl champion as an assistant coach. In high school at Macon’s Ballard-Hudson, playing on average teams, Hart was a three-year starter and the team MVP as a senior in 1963. With SEC opportunities unavailable, Hart became a three-time all-conference player at Atlanta’s Morris Brown College and also earned three letters as a lanky 6-foot-4 track-and-field sprinter and shot putter. The San Francisco 49ers took Hart in the 10th round of the 1968 NFL Draft. Hart became a starter at defensive end in 1970 and held the position through 1977. He finished third in voting for AP NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1976, when he recorded 16 of his 83 career sacks as part of the 49ers’ defensive line nicknamed the Gold Rush. Hart finished his career as a 1980 starter with the Chicago Bears. In 1981, 49ers coach Bill Walsh hired Hart as an assistant. He was on staff for the 49ers’ Super Bowl victories for the 1984, 1988 and 1989 seasons. Hart was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1993 and the Macon Sports Hall of Fame in 2001.
Silas Jamison
Washington High School Graduate
Silas Jamison was the star quarterback for Booker T. Washington’s 1958 Georgia Interscholastic Association Class AA championship team and the Bulldogs’ 1959 Class AA runner-up. Jamison was identified by longtime GIA football coach Raymond “Tweet” Williams as the greatest football player and all-around athlete from Atlanta during the GIA era, which went from 1948 until Atlanta schools joined the Georgia High School Association in 1966. Jamison passed for three touchdowns and scored another in Washington’s 33-6 victory over Macon’s Ballard-Hudson for the 1958 championship. It was Washington’s fourth GIA title, the most of any school at that time, all under Georgia Sports Hall of Fame coach L.C. Baker. Jamison turned down several college football opportunities, including one from Indiana, when he signed a bonus contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. He played four minor league seasons. “He was the top ball player in Atlanta, an all-around athlete,” said Williams, who coached outstanding teams at rival Turner High. “We had beaten Washington about five straight times until Jamison came around. He was great.” Former Spencer player and longtime Carver-Columbus coach Wallace Davis confirmed Jamison’s reputation, saying: “He had a receiver named Joe Allen. You weren’t going to beat Washington with them boys.” Jamison’s career ended in an upset when Ballard-Hudson defeated Washington 14-7 for the 1959 title.
Jack Pitts
Trinity High School Graduate
Jack Pitts was the quarterback of the 1965 Class A GIA championship team from Decatur’s Trinity High and was a catalyst for integrating Deep South college football. Pitts passed for two touchdowns and ran for another in Trinity’s 19-14 victory over Wilson of Tifton in the state championship game. Pitts also intercepted a pass that led to the winning touchdown, which he scored. Contemporary newspaper articles credited Pitts with 33 touchdowns scored for his career and 24 rushing or passing touchdowns in the first five games of 1965. He was the MVP of the 1966 GIA East-West All-Star Game. Pitts is believed to be the first African American from metro Atlanta to play football in the Big Ten after signing with Michigan State, whose coach, Duffy Dougherty, called Pitts “the greatest quarterback prospect we’ve ever seen.” Pitts, also the valedictorian of his class, had more than 20 scholarship offers. But as he recounted years later, “Georgia and Georgia Tech wouldn’t recruit me because I was a Negro.” In 1966, the Atlanta Constitution and Sports Illustrated pointed to Pitts as an example of how racist policies held back Southern college football. A neck injury sidelined Pitts at Michigan State, but he went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees there. Decatur High, a formerly all-white school that absorbed Trinity’s students in 1968, added Pitts to its Wall of Honor in 2015.
PREVIOUS INDUCTEES
Julius Adams
Ballard-Hudson High School Graduate
(Class of 2023) Julius Adams was Ballard-Hudson High’s team MVP as a senior two-way tackle in 1966. His hometown Macon Telegraph called Adams a “star tackle” and "one of the outstanding linesmen in the state of Georgia” as a junior. Adams, who was 6 feet, 4 inches and 250 pounds as a senior, also was an outstanding track-and-field thrower in the shot put and javelin. UCLA and Michigan State recruited him, but he opted to attend Texas Southern, where he was a four-year starter. Adams earned all-conference in 1968 and 1970. Before his NFL rookie season, he played in the College Football All-Star Game in Chicago, which pitted college all-stars against the reigning NFL champion Baltimore Colts. The New England Patriots drafted Adams in the second round of the 1971 NFL Draft. He started as a rookie and finished fifth in the NFL’s defensive rookie-of-the-year voting. Adams played in 206 NFL games across 16 seasons with 158 starts. He had 80.5 career sacks. In 1980, Adams made the Pro Bowl. Adams is a member of the Patriots’ 1970s and 1980s all-decade teams and the 35th- and 50th-anniversary teams. In 1985, his final season as a Patriots starter, Adams played in the Super Bowl against the Chicago Bears. Adams passed away on in 2016, at age 67, just days before after being selected to the Macon Sports Hall of Fame. Adams is the father of Keith Adams, a seven-year NFL middle linebacker.
Emerson Boozer
Laney High School Graduate
(Class of 2022) Emerson Boozer arguably is the best Georgia Interscholastic Association player ever. He scored more than 20 touchdowns for Laney’s 1961 GIA championship team and scored the lone touchdown to go along with 156 rushing yards in the 7-0 championship win over Washington. Boozer also ran for 314 yards in a single game against Peter G. Appling in 1961. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2007 ranked Boozer as the No. 15 Georgia high school football player of all time. He was selected in the sixth round of the 1966 AFL Draft by the Jets and in the seventh round of the 1966 NFL Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Boozer signed with the Jets and won the AFL championship with them in 1968 before going on to beat the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Boozer became the first former GIA player ever to win a Super Bowl. Boozer was selected to two Pro Bowls and led the AFL in rushing touchdowns in 1967. He also became the only graduate of a GIA school to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame for his exploits at Maryland Eastern Shore.
Ernie Green
Spencer High School Graduate
(Class of 2023) Ernie Green is remembered in the NFL as the fullback who opened holes for NFL legend Jim Brown, but Green, a Columbus, Ga., native, produced 5,240 yards from scrimmage in his own right – 3,204 rushing, 2,036 receiving – during a seven-year career with the Cleveland Browns. Green and Brown made up the Browns’ starting backfield for their NFL championship team in 1964. Green switched from halfback to fullback after Brown’s retirement and helped block for Leroy Kelly, another NFL Hall of Famer, leading to Green’s selection to Pro Bowls in 1966 and 1967. In high school, Green was a star in the Georgia Interscholastic Association and played for Spencer, the GIA’s greatest football program. Spencer won four GIA championships in Georgia’s segregated era, including one during Green’s junior season of 1956, when Spencer was undefeated. Green was a rare four-year starter for legendary GIA coach Odis Spencer. Green also was his school’s class president and a member of the National Honor Society. Green went on to play at the University of Louisville, one of the first historically white Southern schools to allow African American players. Green led Louisville in rushing twice. He also was the third baseman and the only African American on Louisville’s baseball team. Green has been inducted into Louisville’s Ring of Honor. After his football days, Green founded Ernie Green Industries, a Kettering, Ohio, company that opened 15 manufacturing plants in three countries.
Clarence Scott
Trinity High School Graduate
(Class of 2022) Clarence Scott won a state championship as a two-way starter at Trinity High in Decatur in 1965, then became the first graduate of a Georgia Interscholastic Association school to become a first-team All-American in a major college football conference and then the first to be taken in the first round of the NFL Draft. Scott was a two-year starter at Trinity, the Decatur school for African Americans during segregation, and played wide receiver and cornerback. He played four seasons, three as a starter, at Kansas State. In 1970, he was named All-American (FWAA, Sporting News, Time, Pro Football Weekly), making him the first African American from a Georgia high school to do so in what now would be called a Power 5 Conference. (There have been more than 75 since.) In 1971, the Browns drafted him 14th overall. He intercepted two passes in his first NFL game. Scott played 13 NFL seasons and made the 1973 Pro Bowl. Scott is a member of sports halls of fame for Kansas State and the states of Georgia and Kansas.
Otis Sistrunk
Spencer High School Graduate
(Class of 2022) Otis Sistrunk, best known as a star defensive end for outstanding Oakland Raiders teams of the 1970s, was a product of Spencer High, the predominant football power in the old Georgia Interscholastic Association that operated during segregation. At 6 feet, 4 inches, Sistrunk was an outstanding player for his Columbus high school in the 1960s but chose to enter the U.S. Marine Corps afterward. Sistrunk then played in two semi-pro leagues for the next five years and garnered three all-star selections. An NFL scout saw him in a 1971 all-star game and got him a tryout, and that’s how he joined the Raiders. He made the NFL all-rookie team in 1972 and the Pro Bowl in 1974 and started on the Raiders’ Super Bowl championship team for the 1976 season. After his pro career, Sistrunk returned to Georgia and worked in Fort Benning for 12 years. He now runs Cowan and Memorial Stadium on Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the state of Washington.