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Congressional Daily Record
This section is a tribute, commemoration, or district-facing statement. It mentions members such as Sanford Dixon Bishop. Extensions of Remarks are statements submitted for the official record, even if they were not spoken live on the floor.
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September 15, 2026
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Download official Extensions PDFReturn to issue contextHON. SANFORD D. BISHOP, JR.
of georgia
in the house of representatives
Mr. BISHOP. 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.
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.
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
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.
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.