EIR

Major Facepalms People Shared This Month 👇

Confusing Marie Curie and Mariah Carey is sooooo embarrassing.

Garden update!

She used the racist assumption that she was white to save Black girls men were trying to disappear.

Victoria Earle Matthews understood something terrifying about America in the 1890s: young Black women could vanish into cities, and too many people would look away.

Born enslaved in Georgia in 1861, Matthews became a journalist, activist, and reformer in New York. She listened to the stories other people dismissed — stories of girls and young women lured north with promises of decent jobs, safe rooms, and better wages. Instead, some were trapped, exploited, or pushed into situations they had never agreed to.

Matthews was light-skinned, and she used the racism around her as a weapon against itself.

Passing as white, she went undercover to investigate the men and networks preying on Black women. She moved through spaces where she would not have been welcomed if they knew who she was. She listened. She gathered information. She saw how poverty, racism, and gender made Black girls dangerously easy targets.

But Matthews did not stop at exposure.

In 1897, she helped found the White Rose Mission in New York City, a refuge for Black women and girls arriving from the South. It offered shelter, education, job guidance, and protection in a city that could be brutal to young women with nowhere to turn.

Her work was not charity. It was rescue. It was strategy. It was a Black woman building the safety net that society refused to provide.

Victoria Earle Matthews knew the world was willing to endanger Black girls, then blame them for what happened.

So she stepped into the danger first.

And pulled as many as she could back out.