Raymond 'Tweet' Williams, a trailblazer in Atlanta athletics, dies at 99

Raymond “Tweet” Williams, a former athletic director at Clark Atlanta, principal and football coach for Atlanta Public Schools, longtime sports official and member of four sports halls of fame, died Monday. He was 99.

Williams was a standout athlete at Atlanta’s Washington High and Clark College, then coached football and other sports at APS schools Turner (1951-67), Douglass (1968-69) and Northside (1970-71) before becoming an APS principal or assistant principal for many years.

He was Clark’s athletic director from 1988 to 1991 before returning to APS.

Most of Williams’ high school sports teams competed in the Georgia Interscholastic Association, the sports governing body for historically Black schools during segregation.

After retiring, Williams became a resource for GIA history and was instrumental in getting the GHSA to recognize the champions of the GIA era (1948-69) on its website.

Williams was prominently featured in a documentary about the GIA titled “As If We Were Ghosts” released in 2022 by Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Read more on AJC.com.