Celebration of 110 Christmases

A Christmas Day parade will honor the 110th birthday of Las Cruces resident Clayton Flowers, a former Tuskegee Airman.

The parade will begin lining up at 1:30 p.m. at the corner of Triviz Drive and Craig Avenue, and will begin at 2 p.m. Participation in the parade is open to anyone who wants to join in.

This is the third consecutive year for the drive-by, which is sponsored by the Doña Ana Branch of the NAACP, branch president Bobbie Green said.

“I’m grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to honor him as a living legend,” Green said. “We want to recognize him for the sacrifices he has made and what he stands for. It is important.”

Green said members of the Las Cruces Police Department, the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Department and the Las Cruces Fire Department will participate in the drive-by and provide traffic control.

“They’re honored to salute him as they drive by,” she said.

Green said Flowers continues to live by himself, regularly visited by family members and caregivers.

“I took him his favorite apple pie at Thanksgiving,” she said. “We had a lovely time. It was beautiful.”

Flowers was born Dec. 25, 1915, on Solisberg Road in rural Surry County, Virginia. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, joined the Army Air Corps and was assigned to officer candidate school in Tuskegee, Alabama. Flowers became part of the highly-decorated 477th Medium-Bomber Group, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen, the Army’s first Black pilots.

After the unit was transferred to Freeman Field near Seymour, Indiana, Flowers was part of a group of more than 100 Black officers who tried to enter an all-white officers club there on Apr. 5 and 6, 1945. Sixty-one of the Black officers were arrested and court-martialed on minor charges, with one officer convicted. President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948 – in part because of the Freeman Field incident. All charges from the incident were dropped in 1995.

Flowers left the Army as a first lieutenant after five years of service.

He became a housing contractor, working with his brother, Fred, and their father, who came out of retirement to help. Like his father, Flowers became a successful bricklayer, but he had to give that up when he developed tennis elbow. Flowers left the family business to return to school, becoming a math teacher.

He married Evelyn Lorraine Church, a Michigan native who was also a teacher, on Aug. 11, 1951, in New York City. The couple settled on Manhattan’s lower east side. They raised three children and started traveling the U.S. and Canada after the birth of their first grandchild. The Flowers’ moved to Deming and then to Las Cruces in 1984. Evelyn Flowers died on Valentine’s Day 2008 at age 88.

Flowers attributes his longevity to a tolerance for others and their beliefs. And, although Flowers said he has “always been a talkative person, I’m not really obsessed with myself,” he told the Bulletin in a 2022 interview.