SAN ANTONIO — More than a century ago, businessman P.F. Roberts provided an essential service to the Black community. In 1895, Henry Porter Field Roberts came to San Antonio to teach, planting roots in the Baptist Settlement community.
Many African Americans settled in this neighborhood, making it the first black community after emancipation in San Antonio.
“So, he was a very talented man,” said Dr. Charles Gentry. “Both an entrepreneur and an educator.”
Dr. Charles Gentry is a UTSA instructor and researcher with the Center of Cultural Sustainability. He says Roberts was one of the few black businessmen in San Antonio.
“P.F. Roberts ran a grocery store,” Gentry said. “Dry goods and meats and whatnot that he sold to the residents here.”
Roberts served his community when others wouldn’t, and now an official Texas historical marker stands where the store once was.
“This is a time of Jim Crow, segregation, which meant that there were certain spaces open to African Americans,” Gentry said.
Roberts’ unlikely friendship with a confederate colonel helped the store become a reality.
“Col. Tom C. Frost, of the Frost Bank family, that’s very well known here in San Antonio, provided a loan for P.F. Roberts to obtain the land and open up the grocery store,” Gentry said.
That $2000 loan would now be worth about $60,000.
“The loan came while P.F., my grandfather, was hunting on his deer lease,” said Ernest Qadimasil.
Robert’s grandson, Ernest Qadimasil, says Frost risked it all back then — lending money to a black man.
“Such a dangerous decision by Col. Thomas Claiborne Frost. He could have been lynched, hung, murdered,” said Qadimasil.
The marker on the corner of Indianola Street and East Cesar Chavez acknowledges Roberts as a charter member of San Antonio’s NAACP branch, an advocate for civil rights.
“Which was helping to seek better opportunities for education and equality in business and housing,” Gentry said.
