Jessie Daniel Ames, born in Palestine, Texas in 1883, was a prominent player in the fight both for women's rights and for an end to lynching in the south.  Married to Roger Ames, she spent much of her adult life single, as her husband was fighting blackwater fever in South America.  He died just nine years after they were married, leaving Ames to raise three children on her own.  She became involved in several Methodist groups in her community, which ultimately spurred her interest in suffrage. 

She was elected treasurer of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association in 1918 and served as a delegate to the national Democratic Party conventions from 1920 to 1928.  Ames led the way for Texas to become the first state to ratify the nineteenth amendment, giving women the right to vote.  She was the founding president of the Texas League of Women Voters. 

Ames continued to fight for the rights of the oppressed, and she became director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) in Atlanta in 1922.  She led a hotly protested fight to end the practice of lynching.  She was one of the first southern white women to publicly protest this practice.  She fought to demonstrate not only that lynching was a brutal form of oppression for blacks, but that it also, by nature, suggested weakness and vulnerability of women (as lynching was supposedly an act meant to defend a woman's honor.) She founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in 1930, and she worked to obtain over 40,000 signatures in support of the cause.  Although the bill she was hoping to pass ultimately failed, her work led to a decrease in the practice of lynching.  Ames braved against a hostile community and physical threats in her fight for black men's rights. 

Ames died in 1972 in Austin, Texas.

Submitted by: Karen Langdon