In 1897, Matthews founded the White Rose Industrial Home for Working Class Negro Girls, also known as the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for young Black Women, to provide them with safe housing, education, and life and job skills.

Victoria Earle was born into slavery on May 27, 1861, in Fort Valley, Georgia, a month before the start of the Civil War.

[2] Shortly after she was born, her mother, Caroline Smith, escaped from their master, leaving behind Victoria and her eight siblings.

[3] The Smith family's racial ambiguity, and the fact that the children lived in the master's house, conforms to the belief that their owner was their father.

Caroline Smith conducted a legal battle to gain custody of her daughters[3] and she was the first black woman to be recognized in Georgia's court system.

[4] Matthews, her mother, and her sister, Anna, traveled from Georgia to Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, and eventually, ended up in New York City in 1873.

[5] Later, on October 22, 1879,[6] at the age of eighteen, Victoria Smith married William E. Matthews, a coachman from Petersburg, Virginia.

On October 5, 1892, Victoria Earle Matthews and educator and activist, Maritcha Remond Lyons, organized a testimonial dinner in New York's Lyric Hall for Ida B.

Wells and her anti-lynching campaign which led to the founding of the Woman's Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn.

[11][12] It was a time of the rise of fraternal and women's organizations, and Matthews served as the first president of the Woman's Loyal Union (WLU).

[9] The WLU was a civil rights organization that worked against racial discrimination and supported the anti-lynching crusade of the journalist Ida B.

[14] "The Value of Race Literature was delivered at the First National Congress of Colored Women in Boston, Massachusetts on July 30th, 1895.

After the death of her 16-year-old son, Lamartine, Matthews channeled her grief and began to concentrate on helping young people of his age.

Eventually, she became involved in settlement work, started by Progressive women in industrial cities such as Chicago and New York, which were accepting tens of thousands of European immigrants, as well as many migrants from the rural South.

[13] Matthews learned that life for African Americans was difficult and plagued with "limited economic opportunities, inadequate housing, poverty, prejudice, and racially motivated violence.

"[4] At this time, thousands of young blacks were arriving in New York as part of the Great Migration, in hopes of finding better work and opportunities than in the Jim Crow South.

Matthews thought that young women needed a safe place to stay while they learned job skills to allow them to work.

[4] Of mixed race, she had considerable European heritage; her fair skin and appearance, combined with her education, this enabled her to gain preferential treatment.

[4] With the initial help of Winthrop Phelps, a white philanthropist who offered a flat in an apartment house he owned, on February 11, 1897, they opened a place where colored girls could go for training in domestic work.

In addition to life skills in math, reading and writing, Matthews educated her students in race history and literature.

[13] Matthews and her volunteers taught young women the skills needed at the time: sewing, millinery, and cooking.

The White Rose Industrial Home allowed for students to be around their teachers, learning from them and each other in daily life, as well as to have some protection for a time.

[17] Matthews was also a member of the board of directors for McDonough Memorial Dispensary, a hospital that would serve Black people and all nationalities.

[20] Matthews implements symbolism, the fire, to represent the emotional turmoil Aunt Lindy is experiencing.

Amina Gautier wrote "the fire of retribution sweeps through Lindy, burning away all thoughts of Christian forgiveness."

She takes note of the obscurity surrounding Adele's past, her mother dying in childbirth and her father shipping her off abroad.

He grows aware of his own ignorance, his crippled manhood, and the need to break free from the shackles of slavery.

The day finally comes when she embraces her limping, one handed, starving, and exhausted George King, as is his free name.

[23] The all-black Victoria Earle Matthews (Mothers) Club, named after her, helped girls and women who had been sexually abused or threatened with such.

[25] Matthews is remembered with a plaque saying, "The White Rose Home" on the brownstone of her Brooklyn residence at 33 Poplar Street.