Charles H. Flowers: A historical icon

Charles Herbert Flowers remembers how excited he was to begin his training as a pilot in the Army Air Corps in Tuskegee, Ala. He grasped at the opportunity to enroll in September 1941 after being told that for the first time, the Air Corps was accepting blacks into its cadet program.

Two days after he completed his training in May 1942, Flowers was asked to stay on at Tuskegee to be a flight instructor. He would provide primary-level flight training to cadets joining the program.
Flowers became known as a Tuskegee Airman.
He was among scores of African Americans who broke the flight barrier to become America's first black military airmen, according to the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. Web site.
''Those who possessed the physical and mental qualifications were accepted as aviation cadets to be trained initially as single-engine pilots and later to be either twin-engine pilots, navigators or bombardiers," the Web site states.
Flowers, 88, who lives in Glenarden, has racked up several firsts since his aviation days, and in honor of his achievements, Prince George's County named one of its schools — the Charles H. Flowers High School in Springdale — in his honor in 2000.
Flowers was the first student government president at North Carolina Central University; he was among the first round of cadets that graduated from Tuskegee; and he became the first African-American, military-trained flight instructor for the Tuskegee Airmen.
''I still feel like I'm going to wake up and find out it was all a big dream," Flowers said of having a school named after him.
Boyd Poole, a member of Ebenezer United Methodist Church in Lanham, which Flowers attends, said he played a role in the school-naming process. Poole said that around 1997, he learned that Flowers was a Tuskegee Airman only after he saw a display about him at the church.
''The man doesn't talk about himself. What a gentleman he is," Poole said.
Poole, a special assistant to state Sen. Nathaniel Exum (D-Dist. 24) of Capitol Heights, said he showed some of the exhibits to Exum, who was a state delegate at the time. Exum then got the General Assembly to recognize Flowers as the state's black history representative during Black History Month that year, Poole said.