Jessie
Daniel Ames dedicated her life to working for social justice -- first in the suffrage
movement, helping to secure the right to vote for women in Texas; then in the
civil rights movement, crusading against lynching in the South; and later in life
in the political realm. In the teens and early 1920s Jessie Daniel Ames focused
on women's rights and was the founding president of the Texas League of Women
Voters. In the early 1920s she also became concerned about racial injustice in
the South, particularly the widespread and commonplace lynchings of blacks. In
1930 she founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching
and traveled throughout the South, creating local chapters and forging alliances
with many other groups and organizations to work for racial equality. Under her
direction thousands of Southern women convinced sheriffs, judges, churches, social
clubs and politicians to sign pledges condemning lynching, in addition to spreading
anti-lynching literature and conducting lectures throughout the South. Thanks
to this campaign, in 1940, for the first time since the Civil War, no lynchings
were recorded. Author and historian, Alan Brinkley, chose freedom hero, Jessie
Daniel Ames, as one of the "Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed
the History Books."
