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 Since
the founding of their first company, Roberts-Roberts & Associates (RRA),
in 1974, Michael V. Roberts and Steven C. Roberts have built an
empire worth an estimated $1 billion. Roberts-Roberts is now part of
a family of concerns that comprise the Roberts Companies and
function as umbrellas for a total of 76 businesses. Those involve
real estate, including the construction and management of
residential, retail, and commercial properties; broadcasting;
wireless telecommunications; aviation; public relations; custom
cabinetry; and hotel management. The brothers also own a historic
theater in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have lived since birth
and where they maintain their headquarters. “We are diversified,”
Michael Roberts told Pam Droog for St. Louis Commerce Magazine
(May 2003). “I always felt that’s important. If you limit yourself
to one sector of business opportunities in this economy, you die.”
Michael Roberts, the older of the brothers, is the chairman and
chief executive officer of the Roberts Companies; Steven is the
president. Both men are lawyers, and both have served on St. Louis's
board of aldermen, the city's legislative body—Michael from 1977 to
1983 and Steven from 1979 to 1991. In the course of their careers,
the Robertses have contributed beyond measure to the well-being of
thousands of St. Louisans through job creation and urban-renewal
projects and, in both those spheres, initiatives aimed at increasing
the presence of women and members of minority groups in all facets
of private enterprise. The brothers' affirmative-action efforts have
also helped many people living in and around Washington, D.C., New
York City, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Kay Gabbert, the
conglomerate's senior vice president, who has worked with Michael
and Steven Roberts since 1982, listed on the Roberts Companies Web
site three major reasons for the brothers' success: “They are very
aggressive; they never say they can't do something; [and] they are
always looking for opportunities.” Michael Roberts is the author of
the self-published book Action Has No Season: Strategies and
Secrets to Gaining Wealth and Authority (2005).
The first of the four children of Victor and Delores (Talley)
Roberts, Michael Victor Roberts was born on October 24, 1948; Steven
Craig Roberts, the second child, was born on April 11, 1952. Their
brother, Mark, and sister, Lori, work for the Roberts Companies. The
Robertses' paternal grandfather was a physician. Their father served
in World War II as a member of one of the nation's all-black
infantry units; he held the job of night-shift supervisor when he
retired from the U.S. Postal Service after working there for 39
years and is now the chief financial officer of the Roberts
Companies (but refuses to take a salary). Delores Roberts was a
homemaker who later became a schoolteacher. “We were pretty much
sheltered as a middle-class African-American family,” Michael told
Shelley Smithson for St. Louis's Riverfront Times (March 17,
2004). “We were taught traditional work habits and values. We were
altar boys in the Episcopal Church.” Their mother saw to it that her
children engaged in educational extracurricular activities, such as
Saturday-morning science classes held in a local park.
The Robertses lived with the children's paternal grandmother in
north St. Louis until 1958. That year, along with a dozen other
African-American families, they moved into their own home in a newly
built enclave in that part of the city. The residents of houses
surrounding their small development were white, and as boys the
Roberts brothers were subjected both to institutionalized racism
and, occasionally, racist acts by individuals. They were not
permitted to swim with whites in public pools and were permitted to
sit only in a designated area behind right field at home games of
the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club, and even after the Supreme
Court, in 1954, ruled unconstitutional the enforced segregation of
public schools, the public schools the boys attended remained all
black. One day when Steven was about six, “I was playing baseball
with these kids who were white,” he recalled to Smithson. “We were
in my backyard and there was this big redneck-looking guy who came
out of this four-family flat behind our home. He comes out and grabs
his son and says, ‘You can't play with him because he's a n*****.’ I
didn't even know what a n***** was.” As the boys got older, they
witnessed so-called white flight from the neighborhoods adjacent to
their enclave: when a few black families bought homes from whites on
those streets, realtors warned other white homeowners that the value
of their property was going to decline as a result. The realtors
would then buy the whites' homes at below market value and sell them
to black families at a handsome profit.
According to Michael Roberts, he and Steven “were always linked,” as
he told Pam Droog. “We were pretty much interested in achieving our
goals, and in working.” The boys earned money by shoveling snow,
mowing lawns, and delivering newspapers. “By the age of 11 or 12, I
was making about a buck a week mowing the yard for my parents,”
Michael recalled to Gary Pettus for the Jackson, Mississippi,
Clarion-Ledger (March 25, 2007). “Then I was invited to cut a
neighbor's yard, and they paid me $5 for the same work. That's when
the light bulb went off: I realized I could make more money working
for myself.” He added, “Ownership, in my opinion, is the key to the
success of the abundant lifestyle. I did not want to be a part of
someone else's destiny. I wanted my own. Whether I was making a lot
of money was beside the point.”
In 1967 Michael Roberts graduated from Northwest High School, St.
Louis's first desegregated secondary school. He spent the first part
of his college career at the University of Central Missouri, in
Warrensburg, and then St. Louis Community College at Forest Park; at
the latter he helped to found the Black Students Association. One
summer he attended Camp Winnewanka, an American Youth Foundation
facility founded by William H. Danforth (who established the St.
Louis–based Ralston Purina Co.). At that camp, which aimed to
instill feelings of Christian brotherhood in teenagers, Michael met
Danforth's grandson John “Jack” Danforth, an Episcopal minister and
Missouri politician (and later, for two decades, a U.S. senator).
Armed with a Danforth fellowship, Michael transferred to Lindenwood
University, in St. Charles, Missouri; money he earned by selling
dashikis helped to pay his expenses. He received a B.S. degree in
English literature and communications in 1971. Earlier, he had
briefly considered studying medicine or becoming an Episcopal
priest, “because in that role I could pontificate to people on
Sunday mornings,” he told Droog. “But I realized if I went to law
school and got into politics I could pontificate every day.” Roberts
attended the Saint Louis University School of Law. As a law-school
student, he also took classes at the International Institute of
Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, in 1972, and the Hague Academy
of International Law in the Netherlands, in 1973. He earned a J.D.
degree in 1974. Meanwhile, in 1970, Steven Roberts had entered Clark
University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, also as a Danforth fellow.
He majored in both sociology and economics and earned a B.A. degree
in 1974. He, too, toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor or a
priest, then decided to study law. In 1978 he earned both a master's
of law degree in urban law and a J.D. degree at Washington
University, in St. Louis. He also studied law abroad. According to
Michael Roberts, neither he nor Steven ever planned to practice law;
rather, he told Droog, they attended law school because they
believed that it offered “a great extended liberal arts education
that also teaches you a new language, how to think, how to perceive
opportunities more quickly.”
Earlier, in 1974, Michael and Steven Roberts had launched
Roberts-Roberts & Associates, as a business-consulting and
construction-management company. The impetus, Michael told Droog,
was the growing number of multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuits
being brought against large companies and government agencies for
alleged discrimination against women and members of minority groups.
The danger of being sued or fined for noncompliance with
government-mandated affirmative-action rules led corporate and
public entities to seek advice from RRA on ways to increase the
participation of so-called disadvantaged business enterprises (DBEs)
and minority- and women-owned businesses (MBEs and WBEs) in
construction projects, which typically involve many suppliers and
contractors. Among other accomplishments listed on the RRA Web site,
thanks to RRA such St. Louis–based companies as the food wholesaler
Wetterau Inc. and Southwestern Bell (now AT&T Southwest) paid $63
million (between 1974 and 1983) and $167 million (in 1983 and 1984),
respectively, to MBEs and/or WBEs, and, nationally, Anheuser-Busch
companies paid $2.2 billion to MBE or WBE construction companies
between 1983 and 2003. Other major DBE, MBE, or WBE contracts
negotiated with RRA's assistance were connected with Missouri
Department of Transportation and Metropolitan Washington Airports
Authority projects, the Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, the
Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project (in Washington, D.C.), and the St.
Louis Cardinals' new stadium.
Also in 1974, with a $7,000 loan from his father, who had borrowed
the money from the credit union set up for U.S. Postal Service
workers, Michael began to acquire real estate. He would buy
dilapidated inner-city houses, have them renovated, and sell them at
a profit. In addition to amassing capital, he used the renovated
properties as collateral for loans for additional purchases. In 1982
Michael and Steven formed Roberts Brothers Properties (RBP) and
purchased a three-story, 200,000-square-foot building in Fountain
Park, an economically depressed area of St. Louis. After the
renovation of the building, which had once been a Sears Roebuck
outlet, they moved RRA and RBP offices to the top floor and
gradually leased spaces on the other floors to a total of 50
government agencies and businesses, including retail stores and
eateries. By 1985 the Victor Roberts Building, as the brothers had
named it, had become a destination for some 3,000 shoppers and
others daily. Nevertheless, in 2000 and 2001, when the Robertses
attempted to get loans to build a mall adjacent to their building,
every bank turned them down on the grounds that the site was not a
“good location,” as Michael told Droog. The brothers proceeded with
construction nevertheless, using $4 million of their own funds.
Called the Shops at Roberts Village, the mall opened in 2003. That
year Roberts Brothers Properties bought the seven-story St. Louis
Board of Education Building, in the historic Old Post Office
District in the city's downtown, and had it converted into 47 luxury
rental apartments and lofts and 8,000 square feet of retail space.
The first tenants moved there in 2005. In 2006 the brothers broke
ground on Roberts Place, a gated community in St. Louis’s Upper West
End that will consist of 72 rental apartments and 24 single-family
homes. The homes, which were still under construction at the end of
2009, were designed to meet the Leadership in Energy Efficient
Design (LEED) standards for environmentally responsible building
design. In addition to other properties in St. Louis, the Roberts
brothers own Roberts Isle, a 76-unit gated condominium development
in Nassau, Bahamas.
Following their purchase of the historic Mayfair hotel in downtown
St. Louis, in 2003, and the Crowne Plaza in Marietta, Georgia, in
2006, the brothers established the Roberts Hotels Group LLC. In
addition to St. Louis and Marietta, their portfolio includes hotels
in Dallas and Houston, Texas; Tampa and Fort Myers, Florida;
Shreveport, Louisiana; Jackson and Memphis, Mississippi (which
borders Memphis, Tennessee); and Spartanburg, South Carolina. In
2007 the Roberts Hotels Group were named an Ernst & Young 2007
Entrepreneur of the Year, and their extensively renovated Crowne
Plaza in Marietta, jointly managed by the InterContinental Hotels
Group, won the top award at InterContinental's annual meeting. It
was also honored as the best-managed of InterContinental's more than
400 Crowne Plaza hotels. In 2003 Michael and Steven also purchased
the Historic American Theater, in St. Louis. The renovated building,
which they renamed the Roberts Orpheum Theater, reopened in 2005.
In 1989, with the purchase of the St. Louis television station WRBU,
the Roberts brothers launched the Roberts Broadcasting Co.
Originally an affiliate of the Home Shopping Network, the station
became an affiliate of UPN in 2003 and of the Fox-owned MyNetwork TV
in 2006. As of late 2009 the brothers owned three television
stations—WRBU in St. Louis, WZRB in Columbia, South Carolina, and
WRBJ in Jackson, Mississippi—as well as WRBJ-FM, a hip-hop radio
station in Jackson. In April 2007 the Robertses announced that their
stations would no longer be permitted to broadcast anything that
they deemed unacceptably violent, sexist, or racist.
In the late 1990s the Roberts brothers entered the emerging
wireless-communication market. They launched Roberts Wireless
Communications, and along with the telecommunications company Sprint
(now Sprint Nextel Corp.), they built wireless networks in Missouri,
Kansas, and Illinois. Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent) lent
$56 million to the project, whose cost totaled $78 million. In 2001
Alamosa Holdings, a Sprint affiliate at that time, bought out
Roberts Wireless Communications for $300 million. The Roberts
Companies retained ownership of communication towers in Missouri,
Oklahoma, Illinois, and Kansas, and later, the brothers having
formed the Roberts Tower Co., added towers in Missouri, Utah, New
Mexico, and Tennessee. The demand for the Roberts brothers’ rural
cellular-phone towers, which they had purchased when most other
companies were focused on urban markets, increased significantly as
telecommunications companies including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile
expanded their services. The Roberts Tower Co. is currently the
second-largest privately held tower concern in the U.S.
Roberts Aviation, founded in 2000, “fit with our other companies,
because we had made a big sale and needed an appropriate tax
shelter,” Michael told Pam Droog. The two jets that Roberts Aviation
owns and leases, a 12-passenger Gulfstream II and an eight-passenger
Hawker, “earn their keep,” he said.
For many years the Roberts brothers were also active in politics. In
1976 Michael Roberts assisted Jimmy Carter’s successful run for the
presidency as the manager of the Carter campaign in St. Louis. After
Carter's inauguration Michael became a regular guest at the White
House. According to Pam Droog, “He played tennis with Hamilton
Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, and hob-nobbed with cabinet
members.” In 1976 Michael was elected to the St. Louis board of
aldermen, the equivalent of a city council. He was the youngest
person ever to win a seat on the board until 1979, when Steven won
the contest for alderman in another district. The board of aldermen
had major problems to contend with at that time: because of the loss
of manufacturing jobs and the boom in suburban development that
accompanied a huge increase in highway construction outside the city
during the decades following World War II, St. Louis had suffered
the exodus of half its residents. Many of the St. Louisans who
remained lived in deteriorating housing in rundown neighborhoods.
During Michael's four two-year terms as an alderman and Steven's
six, the brothers worked to reverse the city's declining fortunes
while creating opportunities for minority- and women-owned
businesses. In the process they “met the city's most powerful
developers and learned how to use incentives such as tax-increment
financing and tax abatements to lure investments,” Droog wrote. Each
brother has made an unsuccessful bid for the mayoralty of St. Louis,
Michael losing the Democratic primary in 1989 and Steven doing so in
1993. In his conversation with Droog, Michael blamed their failures
on the decision of William Lacy Clay Sr., who represented various
parts of St. Louis in the U.S. Congress from 1969 until 2001, to
support their opponents for reasons connected with the Democratic
St. Louis political machine.
Among other honors, in 2002 and 2003 the Robertses were listed among
the St. Louis Business Journal’s “100 Leaders to Watch,” and
in 2007 and 2008 they received that magazine's Top 50 Award. In 2009
Michael Roberts received the Trumpet Award for business from the
Trumpet Awards Foundation, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Michael and his wife, Jeanne Gore, a former schoolteacher, have four
grown children—Michael Jr. and Jeanne, who are twins, Fallon, and
Meaghan. Steven and his wife, Eva L. Frazer, a physician, have three
children—Steven Jr., Christian, and Darci, who ranged in age from 15
to 21 in 2009. The brothers and their families live within a block
of each other in St. Louis.
Citation:
Original source: Current Biography
Original publication date: 2010
Original publication type: Print
Publisher of original publication: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database publisher: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database: Biography Reference Bank
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