Person

Victoria Earle Matthews

Boston African American National Historic Site

portrait of a black woman wearing a high-collar blouse. — Writer, Activist, and Clubwoman Victoria Earle Matthews
New York Public Library

A writer, activist, club woman, and social worker, Victoria Earle Matthews dedicated herself to community uplift, civil rights, and helping others.

Born in 1861, Victoria Smith spent her early childhood years enslaved in Georgia. Her mother, Caroline Smith, escaped from her enslaver, Victoria’s father, during the Civil War. After the war, she returned and brought Victoria and her other children to New York City. Victoria attended public schools until financial need forced her to leave and work as a domestic servant. However, she continued to teach herself in the home library of one of her employers. At age eighteen, Victoria married William Matthews and soon had a son, Lamartine.^[1]

Now known as Victoria Earle Matthews, she soon gained national prominence as a journalist and fiction writer. She contributed stories and articles to such publications as She worked as a reporter for the New York Times and the New York Herald. She also contributed to African American newspapers including the New York Age, the Washington Bee, and the National Leader, among others. She edited a collection of speeches by Booker T. Washington, published as Black Belt Diamonds: Gems From The Speeches, Addresses, And Talks To Students Of Booker T. Washington. In 1893, she also published Aunt Lindy, a short fictional story showing the forgiveness and compassion of a formerly enslaved woman towards her past enslaver.^[2]

In addition to her work as a writer and journalist, Matthews became a political activist and organizer. In 1892, she co-founded and led the Woman’s Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn. This Black women’s club supported the anti-lynching campaign of Ida. B. Wells. As president of the organization, Matthews said that the Woman’s Loyal Union:

has a growing influence in the matter of arousing in the public mind a more wholesome state of opinion respecting the barbarous conditions under which our people of the South are forced to exist...The Woman’s Loyal Union will continue to agitate this matter by sending petitions to Congress until they force our lawmakers to the conviction that something must be done to put a stop to the barbarities of the mob power of the South...^[3]

In addition to its anti-lynching initiatives, the Woman’s Loyal Union focused on civil rights and suffrage.^[4]

Representing the Woman’s Loyal Union Club, Matthews attended the First National Conference of Colored Women in July 1895 in Boston. Called by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, this conference drew women from across the country “to band ourselves together for our protection and the welfare of the race.” Here, they formed the National Federation of Afro-American Women. According to one account, Matthews’ "suggestions in the general meetings, her indefatigable service on committees, her resourcefulness and courage tended to make her services invaluable to the new organization..."^[5]

In addition to the Boston conference, Matthews participated in the National Colored Woman’s Congress held in Atlanta, Georgia in December 1895 as part of the Cotton States and International Exposition. Of these gatherings, Matthews wrote:

Our women hunger for better conditions. This was evident at the Boston conference, at Atlanta and is to be seen in the constitution of the various clubs now organized, and representing the most progressive element in the various localities where they are supported.^[6]

Matthews realized the need for a national gathering to unify the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the Atlanta National Woman’s Congress, and the National Colored Woman’s League into "one great body." She served as a principal organizer of the 1896 conference in Washington, D.C. that united these groups as the National Association of Colored Women, with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. Matthews served as the first national organizer of this new association. With its motto of "Lifting as We Climb," the National Association of Colored Women worked for community advancement and uplift, education, civil rights, suffrage, and racial justice.[7]

Following the death of her son in 1895 and a tour of the South after the National Colored Women’s Congress in Atlanta, Matthews turned her focus to alleviating the plight of young people of color. In particular, she investigated the red-light districts and disreputable “employment agencies” that lured young southern Black women to northern cities to ensnare them into a life of prostitution. To counter this sex-trafficking and abuse, Matthews established the White Rose Mission in New York City in 1897. This settlement house and community center combined:

the benefits of an industrial school with the protection of a home. It was to encourage the honest working girls to remain honest working girls, and to protect and help the friendless stranger just arrived from the South until she could find work with respectable employers.^[8]

Throughout the decade that Matthews led the White Rose Mission, the organization found homes for 50,000 young women, having sheltered 5,000 of them onsite.^[9]

In the early days of the White Rose Mission, one reporter wrote that:

Mrs. Victoria Earle Matthews is a Salvation Army field officer, a College Settlement worker, a missionary, a teacher, a preacher, a Sister of Mercy, all in one, and without being in the least conscious of it.^[10]

Following several years of sickness, Matthews passed away from tuberculosis in New York City in 1907 at the age of 45. One obituary remembered her as:

a woman of very large intelligence and public spirit, and that she devoted the last years of her life to the upbuilding of a needed work of charity, and was able to command in the beginning and to hold to the end a band of devoted women, faithful as she was, to the work speaks volumes for her and for them...In the death of Mrs. Matthews the Afro-American people have lost a strong thinker and a faithful worker, who actually gave her life that others might have it more abundantly. May she find that peace in death which eluded her always in life.^[11]

Her remains are interred at Maple Grove Cemetery, Kew Gardens, Long Island, New York alongside those of her son and husband.

Footnotes

[1] Rayford Logan, "Victoria Earle Matthews," Dictionary of American Negro Biography, (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1982) 428-429; Frances Reynolds Keyser, "Mrs. Victoria Earle Matthews," Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, (Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1926), 214.

[2] Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul Samuel Boyer, eds. Notable American Women, 1607-1950, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 513; Floris Barnett Cash, "Victoria Matthews: Nineteenth-Century Activist and Women’s Advocate," (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street, September 2014), 2; Steve Kramer, "Uplifting Our 'Downtrodden Sisterhood': Victoria Earle Matthews and New York City's White Rose Mission, 1897-1907," The Journal of African American History vol. 91, no. 3 (Summer, 2006), 244-145.

[3] "A Year’s Work of the Woman’s Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn," Times Union, January 5, 1895; Kramer, "Uplifting Our 'Downtrodden Sisterhood,'" 244-245; Cash, "Victoria Matthews: Nineteenth-Century Activist and Women’s Advocate," 2.

[4] Cash, 1.

[5] Keyser, 215-216.

[6] "Colored Woman’s National League," Enterprise, April 4, 1896.

[7] "Colored Woman’s National League," Enterprise, April 4, 1896; Cash, 3.

[8] James et al., Notable Americann Women, 1607-1950, 513; "Interesting Items," Richmond Planet, October 2, 1897; "The White Rose," Boston Evening Transcript, February 1, 1902.

[9] "Victoria Earle Matthews," The New York Age, March 14.

[10] Keyser, 221.

[11] "Mrs. Victoria Earle Matthews," The New York Age, March 21, 1907.