Described by former colleague Dorothy Rupert as having an “infectious love of learning”,[1] Flowers was a lawyer and educator who taught at several high schools and colleges across the country.

[1][3] After her mother died when she was only 10 or 11, she went to live with her grandmother, Minnesota Waters, and her sister, Dorothy, in Cripple Creek, Colorado.

[4] Flowers believed the racism stemmed from patients who came to Boulder from southern states for its health facilities and ended up taking over local businesses and the University of Colorado.

She graduated in 1920 but the principal, an avowed racist, refused to grant her a diploma due to her race (he claimed it was because of a missing assignment that Flowers knew she had completed).

[1][3] CU President George Norlin, an opponent of the Ku Klux Klan, provided her with a job laundering clothes to help her stay in school.

[1][2] She was long thought to be the first African American female CU graduate until it was discovered that that distinction belonged to Lucile Buchanan.

[3][7] Flowers returned to her home in Boulder in 1959 after spending a year in Spain and took a position as head of the foreign language department at Fairview High School which she held until she retired in 1967.