As a sharecropper from rural North Carolina who became the longest-serving airman in Air Force history and the longest-serving African American in the Department of Defense, Major General Alfred K. Flowers knows something about living your legacy.
He offered countless lessons on life, service, leadership, and legacy with the 2024 Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program Scholars earlier this month in Dallas. The Scholars are all leaders in addressing problems facing veterans, service members, or their families.
“Hopefully that’s the goal and mission that all of us have in life – to do good works and leave something behind that will go on after you’re gone,” said Flowers, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Budget.
Upon his retirement from the Air Force in 2012 – after 46 years and five months – he went on to lead an engineering company for several years and joined the boards of many foundations and nonprofits. He’s most passionate about supporting veterans and their families and stays very involved in that work.
“You’ve got to set an example,” he said. “I think everything rises and falls on the leader at the very top. If you are having problems in your organization, look in the mirror.”
Flowers’ background and childhood laid the foundation for his remarkable legacy.
His grandparents raised him in the 1950s and 1960s in a family and community in which sharecropping was prevalent. Sharecroppers, or tenant farmers, worked land owned by someone else in exchange for a place to live and a percentage of the crop, minus the costs of seed and other charges. The system, which grew common in the U.S. South after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, fostered extreme exploitation of those who worked the land, many of them Black families.
Because of this, Flowers had a difficult childhood, experiencing poverty and lacking the opportunity to obtain a quality education. But his background didn’t define him or where he was going.
“I’m thankful that I had the energy and the smarts and loving grandparents that instilled the values and character that helped me to get out of it and do something else,” he said.
Another part of his legacy comes from his long and celebrated leadership journey.
He enlisted in the Air Force at 17 years old and excelled quickly. He strived to do his best every day and to be a servant leader and example to those around him through 13 years of enlisted service, Officer Training School, and beyond. After he was commissioned a second lieutenant, he embarked on an extended career in Air Force finance and budget roles.
He set an example of excellence for not only the Air Force but his own family.
“When I think about personal legacy, I think about my son who is a brigadier general in the Air Force,” he said. “I think about my two grandchildren who want to be in the Air Force and what they will do, and their children will do, and on and on and on for generations to come. That’s legacy.”
General Flowers lives out his legacy every day through the impact he leaves on those he meets, and he left the Veteran Leadership Program Scholars with a charge to do the same.
“What you do every day, and how you interact, treat people, what you accomplish, and how people take that and go do other things and carry on, there’s your legacy,” he said.
