Odis Spencer and L.C. Baker are not names that most Georgia high school football fans know. They are coaches who dominated a lost era of black football during segregation.
Each won four state championships in the Georgia Interscholastic Association, the governing body of high school sports for the state’s African-American high schools through 1970.
Neither coach is in the Georgia Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame, which inducted its ninth class this month in Dalton.
Only five of the 22 football coaches in that hall of fame have as many as state titles as Spencer, who won his four at Spencer High in Columbus, or Baker, who retired over 40 years ago as coach of Booker T. Washington High of Atlanta.
“I surely think the GIA should be recognized," said Wallace Davis, one of Spencer’s former players and a long-time head coach at Carver High of Columbus. “There’s no question about Coach Spencer. He won four state championships. My senior season, we had three guys that played in the NFL and two who signed as free agents. He coached some truly outstanding teams."
Ray Broadaway, the executive director of the GACA Hall of Fame, agrees that GIA coaches have the credentials. But he notes that coaches must be nominated, and no one has stepped up to campaign for Spencer or Baker, perhaps because the hall of fame itself is still striving for a higher profile.
In further defense of the GACA, the coaching records of these and other top GIA coaches are not well-publicized. Only those who remember the GIA or who studied it know much about Spencer and Baker.
"Lot of people who do the nominating didn’t keep up with it," said Leonard King, the starting center for L.C. Baker on Booker T. Washington’s 1951 GIA champion. “In 1951, we didn’t give up but 12 points all year. We probably had one of the best records ever in the state of Georgia. Not too many white teams would’ve beat us."
Wallace Davis, who played for Spencer from 1958 to 1961, was unaware that Spencer wasn’t in the coaches’ hall of fame. Now, he wants to nominate him.
Spencer High (whose football coach and school name were the same, by coincidence) had three future NFL or AFL players who were teammates of Davis. One was Otis Sistrunk, who had a long career with the Oakland Raiders. The others were Charlie Johnson (49ers) and Claude Brownlee (Dolphins).
But those Spencer teams didn’t get the same coverage that all-white teams did in the 1960s, and so their achievements aren’t widely known.
The career of Baker at Washington High is even longer and more impressive than Spencer’s. Baker was Washington’s head coach from 1931 to 1967.
Raymond “Tweet” Williams, who played on Washington’s undefeated teams in 1941, 1942 and 1943, researched Baker’s record and found it to be 222-30-9. Baker had 17 undefeated seasons, most of them in the 1930s and 1940s, before the GIA formed to stage state playoffs.
"During those years, everybody throughout the South [in the black community] knew about Washington High School, and that was because of Baker," Williams said.
“We played schools in Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama, places like that."
Washington’s official state titles were won in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958. Baker was inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in Macon in 2008.
Though Baker and Spencer have been deceased for more than 15 years, Williams said it is important that they be remembered in the coaches hall of fame, too.
"We always had a sense of not really being recognized as participating in sports because we didn’t get the publicity," said Williams, a high school classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. "If we were to believe we were first-class like everybody else, somebody had to instill it in us. If we didn’t have people like Baker, we couldn’t get away from this second-class citizenship."
Todd Holcomb is the editor of Georgia High School Football Daily, which broached the subject of top candidates for the GACA Hall of Fame in last week's issues. To join the mailing list for Todd's free email newsletter on Georgia high school football, you can sign up here or email him at ghsfdaily@bellsouth.net.
