Black business site gets historical marker
After years of careful research, the site of one of San Antonio’s first Black-owned businesses is now apparent to people walking or driving past on César E. Chávez Boulevard — a state historical marker, complete with a tribute to a pioneering entrepreneur and civil rights leader, points it out.
At the center of the story behind the marker at the corner of Indianola Street and Chávez is a friendship between a groundbreaking 31-year-old African American entrepreneur and a 62-year-old white banker and former Confederate officer who crossed social barriers to help him get started.
“This is not a Black thing. This is an us thing — people who believe in what is right,” Ernest Qadimasil, grandson of P.F. Roberts, said during a 37minute address and history lesson at a marker dedication Thursday.
Henry Porter Field “P.F.” Roberts was born in 1869 on a Mississippi plantation. His family members had been enslaved there, then forced to work under a sharecropping system after the Civil War.
Roberts was about 24 when he rode a livestock railroad car to San Antonio. He found work as a teacher in Floresville and later in the Baptist Settlement, one of San Antonio’s first Black neighborhoods that formed south of what is now Hemisfair park.
In 1896, banker Thomas Claiborne “T.C.” Frost, who had supported secession and served in the Confederacy as a lieutenant colonel, befriended Roberts and loaned him money to acquire property.
“It was such a dangerous decision for Col. Thomas Claiborne Frost. He could’ve been lynched, hung, murdered” for helping a Black man, Qadimasil said.
Roberts purchased a wood frame building that became the first P.F. Roberts store, selling meat, groceries, lumber and other essentials, from about 1906 to 1922, in the Baptist Settlement.
Roberts moved to a house on the near East Side that would become a headquarters for civil rights organizing, where local reformers like Charles Bellinger and the Rev. Claude Black were sometimes joined by movement leaders and supporters who were — or would become — national historical figures, including Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
The Roberts name and his business success stood “in contrast to the cruel facts of racial discrimination and potential for violence against commercial enterprises operated by African Americans at that time,” stated the 2021 nomination for a Texas Historical Commission marker prepared by the Center for Cultural Sustainability at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
“Of course, the racial segregation practiced in San Antonio meant African Americans were not allowed into stores for white people,” the statement said.
Charles Gentry, project researcher with the UTSA center who helped with a four-year effort to recognize the former store and other sites tied to history, said the undertaking unfolded during the pandemic and amid “the national reckoning on race relations in the wake of the George Floyd murder.”
“That work felt not only important, it felt very necessary and long overdue,” Gentry said.
Family members believe Frost helped Roberts pay off his mother’s debt at the plantation store in Mississippi so he could bring her to San Antonio, where they lived at least briefly in the building that housed his store.
Roberts married Ira Kilpatrick in 1914 and they had a daughter, their only child, the following year. He became a 1918 charter member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Roberts operated a second store near his home on Pine Street for several years. He closed his first store in 1922, and it was demolished in the 1960s. Roberts died in 1953 at age 83.
Pat Frost, great-great-grandson of T.C. Frost and former Frost Bank president, thanked Qadimasil for “giving us this story that our beliefs, the way we do business with equal access, was done even way back in the 1890s.”
Phil Green, Frost Bank chairman and CEO, said the friendship between Frost and Roberts “and the value that their friendship brought to San Antonio” is worth celebrating.
“It reminds you when you adhere to timeless values, even the small things you do in life can make life better and have impacts that are mighty and enduring,” Green said.