90-year-old joins five Eagle Scouts for long-overdue recognition

On Saturday afternoon, five teenage Boy Scouts from Troop 29 in Mitchellville, Maryland, waited to become that most all-American of figures: Eagle Scouts. People couldn’t stop buzzing about a sixth scout, one much older than the rest – and one about to get a big surprise.

“He still doesn’t know,” said Juan Flora as family and friends began taking their seats at Largo Community Church.

Juan is the son of 90-year-old Herman Flora. Herman was there to watch his grandson, Juan’s son Justice Flora, become an Eagle Scout.

As parents fussed with their sons’ neckerchiefs and straightened badge-heavy sashes, Scoutmaster Ben Taylor went over the choreography for the soon-to-be-Eagles: Enrique Evans, 18; Johnathan Batts, 16; brothers Jalen Mack (17) and Nicholas Mack (16); and Justice, 17.

Herman Flora took a seat near the front.

Guest speaker Gregory Robinson, program director for NASA’s James Webb space telescope, talked about how when he was growing up in segregated Danville, Virginia, the public high school had three curricular tracks: academic, vocational and general. Black students like him were shunted into the vocational and general tracks. Rather than accepting that, Robinson just started taking a seat in advanced math classes.

Don’t let anyone turn you around from your dreams, Robinson counseled. “America has many good things to offer you,” he said.

Ben Taylor walked to the microphone for the part of the ceremony that was inscrutably labeled in the program “Special Presentations.”

Taylor sketched a quick history of Scouting and about the obstacles black Boy Scouts once faced. In parts of the country, especially the Deep South, scout troops were segregated, the result of local custom.

There was a particular impediment to boys who wanted to reach the pinnacle of Scouting, as these five young men had done. Eagle Scout status required the swimming merit badge, and that badge could be earned only in a regulation-sized swimming pool. In many Southern cities, those pools were off-limits to African Americans.

Herman Flora turned to his family. “That sounds like my story,” he said.

It was. Taylor introduced Flora, and as the crowd rose to its feet and applauded, Justice led his grandfather to the podium.

Herman Flora joined the Boy Scouts in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1943. At the time, there was no pool in the area that allowed blacks to swim. There was the river, but that didn’t meet the merit badge requirements. Flora earned other badges, but the swimming badge eluded him.

Even so, he stuck with Scouting. In 1944, scouts of the Tidewater Council were asked if they would head to Virginia’s Eastern Shore to pick vegetables. The Caribbean workers who normally performed those jobs couldn’t come that year.

Flora went, bonding with the other scouts. Some talked about going to college, something he had never considered.

Flora later learned that some black scouts were using the pool at the Norfolk Navy base for their swimming test, but by that time, he had lied about his age and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was 16.

In the Army, Flora kept remembering what some of those Boy Scouts had said: College was the place for them. After the Army, Flora went to Howard University and earned a business degree. He embarked on a successful career in Washington, D.C., real estate.

“Scouting did so much for me,” he said. “It ignited me.”