PBA Galleries

Three photographs (with duplicates) of Pasadena attorney James T. Phillips, ca. 1924, including:

• Small (1½x2") portrait of Phillips (2 copies).
• 1 photo (2 copies) on verso of an unused postcard, of Phillips and two Black women standing in front of the Francisca building on West Dayton Street, which he had constructed to house his law office and several other Black-owned businesses.
• 5 copies of a photograph of the Francisca building itself. 

Phillips was a man of many parts, beginning his career as a Professor at Virginia Normal & Industrial Institute (now Virginia State University), an historically-Black land grant college, then becoming both a pharmacist and lawyer in the Midwest, finally moving, around 1920, to Pasadena, where he became the city’s first African-American lawyer and leader of the Black community.