Jessie Daniel Ames

Jessie Daniel Ames (1883 - 1972) was a United States Southern civil rights activist. She was one of the first Southern white women to speak out and work publicly against lynching. Since lynchings were often ostensibly done in order to "protect" white women, organized efforts by white women in protest against its brutality helped bring about the decline of lynching in the early twentieth century. [Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. "Antilynching Campaign" excerpted from "The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States." [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm] Accessed 15 January 2008.]

Ames was born in Palestine, Texas. She studied at Southwestern College, and thereafter, despite the objection to religion of her father, became a convert to Methodism. In 1905, she married Roger Post Ames, a doctor with the United States Army. He spent most of their married life in Central America, fighting yellow fever with Walter Reed, before dying there himself in 1914.

Jessie, a single 31-year old with three children to support, moved in with her mother and helped with the family business. She also became involved with several Methodist women's groups. This involvement was the impetus for her involvement in the women's suffrage movement.

In 1916 she organized a local women's suffrage association in Texas and helped the state become the first one to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1919, she was the founding president of the Texas League of Women Voters. She also served as a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions of 1920, 1924, and 1928. In 1929 she became the director of the women's committee pf the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.

In 1930 Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She and her co-founders obtained the signatures of 40,000 women to their pledge (see below) against lynching. Despite hostile community opposition and physical threats, they conducted petition drives, lobbying and fundraising across the South to work against lynching. [Angela Y. Davis, "Women, Race & Class". New York: Vintage Books, 1983,p.194]

Pledge:

:We declare lynching is an indefensible crime, destructive of all principles of government, hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity, debasing and degrading to every person involved... [P] ublic opinion has accepted too easily the claim of lynchers and mobsters that they are acting solely in defense of womanhood. In light of the facts we dare no longer to permit this claim to pass unchallenged, nor allow those bent upon personal revenge and savagery to commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women. We solemnly pledge ourselves to create a new public opinion in the South, which will not condone, for any reason whatever, acts of mobs or lynchers. We will teach our children at home, at school and at church a new interpretation of law and religion; we will assist all officials to uphold their oath of office; and finally, we will join with every minister, editor, school teacher and patriotic citizen in a program of education to eradicate lynchings and mobs forever from our land.

[Angela Y. Davis, "Women, Race & Class". New York: Vintage Books, 1983, pp.194-195]

Ames opposed a federal anti-lynching law, however, as she believed that it would be better to get state laws enforced than have the national government step in. Southern Senators filibustered the law, in any case, but Senator Tom Connally of Texas used a letter written to him by Ames to show widespread southern opposition to the anti-lynching bill. Ames meant the letter to be private, and wanted to speak out in opposition to lynching when the bill failed.

References

ources

Bowman, John S. "The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography". (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 15

Davis, Angela Y. "Women, Race & Class". (New York: Vintage Books, 1983, pp.194-195)

Reid, Daniel G. et al. "Dictionary of Christianity in America". (Downers Grove, IL: InterVaristy Press, 1990). ISNB 0-8308-1776-X.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd "The Revolt Against Chivalry". (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974, pp. 239-249)