Jessie Daniel Ames

• Jessie Ames
• Born: November 2, 1883
• Died: February 12, 1972

Suffragist and civil rights activist, was born in Palestine, Texas, the second daughter and third of the four children of James Malcom, a train dispatcher and telegraph operator, and Laura Maria (Leonard) Daniel. Laura Malcom had grown up on an Indiana farm, graduated from Battle Ground Methodist Institute, and taught briefly before marrying James Malcom, a Scotch-Irish orphan from Buffalo, New York. The family moved from Palestine to Overton to Laredo, finally settling in Georgetown, where, in 1902, Jessie was graduated from Southwestern, a coeducational Methodist college. In 1905, after a short courtship, she married a friend of her father’s, Roger Post Ames, an Army physician thirteen years her senior. Their first child, Frederick Daniel, was born in 1907, followed by a daughter, Mary Daniel, in 1913. During most of their nine and a half year marriage, the couple lived separately; Roger practiced medicine in Central America, where he had worked on Walter Reed’s yellow fever experiments, while Jessie Ames stayed with her older sister Lulu in Columbia, Tennessee, visiting her husband periodically. In 1914, when Ames was thirty-one and pregnant with her third child, Lulu Daniel, Roger died of black water fever in Guatemala.

Ames’s family experience left an ambiguous legacy. Her mother was a community leader, active in Methodist missionary societies and women’s clubs and sought after by neighbors for her healing gifts and spiritual inspiration. After both women were widowed, they worked together as owners and operators of a local telephone company and jointly cared for Ames’s children, the youngest of whom was crippled by polio in 1920. In was her mother, Ames said, who “embued me with [the] spirit of pioneering, keeping my chin up, fighting thro.”

Ames’s father influenced her intellectual bent and her religious skepticism. But her dominant memories were his harsh authoritarianism and his unconcealed preference for her older sister, Lulu. The sisters’ lives were closely intertwined: it was to Lulu’s home that Jessie went to bear her children; they shared domestic responsibilities and family crises. Yet her father’s favoritism toward her more conventionally feminine sister kindled in Ames a bitterness that ultimately drove the two women apart. Ames’s early feelings of “unworthiness” were intensified by an unhappy marriage, and it was only after both her husband and father died that she found the independence and self-confidence that launched her reform career.

In 1916, with her mother’s support, she organized a county suffrage association; as a protégé of Texas Equal Suffrage Association president Minnie Fisher Cunningham, she was soon writing and speaking in behalf of women’s rights. Elected treasurer of the state association in 1918, she helped obtain suffrage for women in primary elections and make Texas the first southern state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

In 1919, Ames became the founding president of the Texas League of Women Voters. She was chosen by the national league as a representative to the Pan-American Congress of 1923. She served as a delegate-at-large to the national Democratic party conventions of 1920 and 1924 and as an alternate delegate to the convention of 1928. As an organizer and president of the Texas branch of the American Association of University women and an officer of the Joint Legislative Council, the Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, and the Federation of Women’s Clubs, she sought to mobilize enfranchised women behind the social welfare goals of southern progressivism. Unlike most of her allies, however, Ames soon perceived the limitations of the movement in which she found her start. The female bloc she expected did not materialize. Above all, her political experience in a Ku Klux Klan-dominated era brought her face to face with the contradiction of a social feminism that excluded black women from its ranks and racial oppression from its concerns. In 1924, she became director of the Texas council of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), the South’s chief interracial reform organization, as well as CIC field representative for the Southwest. Moving to Georgia in 1929 as director of the CIC Woman’s Committee, she brought black and white middle-class women together in efforts to break down racist stereotypes and improve segregated facilities, thus bridging the color line through appeals to female solidarity.

Ames made her major reform contribution through the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), which she founded in 1930 and directed until its disbandment in 1942. Black women had filled the front ranks of the larger NAACP-led antilynching movement, and for years they had pressed the issue within the CIC Woman’s Committee. “When Southern white women get ready to stop lynching, it will be stopped and not before,” they said. The Antilynching Association represented an acceptance of this challenge, and for twelve years it hammered home the argument that black men did not provoke lynching by raping white women and that the “false chivalry” of lynching was demeaning to white women even as it terrorized blacks.

Jessie Ames, like other late-Victorian reformers, drew eclectically on nineteenth-century feminist ideals of sisterhood, moral superiority, and a separate “women’s public sphere.” Her tactics were imaginative and courageous, rooted in her experience in small-town women’s clubs, missionary societies, and precinct policies. Working through existing women’s networks, ASWPL members circulated antilynching pledges (obtaining more than 43,000 signatures), investigated lynchings and publicized their findings, printed pamphlets, organized speaking tours, and intervened to prevent lynchings in their own communities. They sought to exercise moral suasion over would-be lynchers in their own homes, their newly won voting power over public officials who collaborated with lynch mobs, and cultural influence over the opinion-makers who created an atmosphere in which violence could flourish.

Jessie Ames represented an implicitly feminist antiracism, leading her constituency toward a critique of a double standard that simultaneously condoned white men’s violence toward black men and their sexual exploitation of black women and toward an understanding of lynching’s deeper roots. She judged the success of her efforts by the declining use of gallantry as a justification for lynching. But the ASWPL’s effectiveness could be measured also in statistical terms: violence against blacks declined in the counties where its efforts were concentrated.

Both the CIC Woman’s Committee and the Antilynching Association, however, were limited in their approach to social change. The “bonds of womanhood” that brought black and white CIC women together did not translate into true egalitarianism within the organization nor opposition to segregation in society at large. The ASWPL message sometimes shaded into a plea for law and order. Moreover, largely at Ames’s insistence, the organization refused to support the NAACP campaign for federal antilynching legislation.

Ames’s obduracy on this issue grew partly from notions of female influence and ties to a local, regional constituency and partly from a personal rigidity that made it difficult for her to follow the leadership of others or admit her own mistakes. Her stand isolated her from her strongest female allies (white Methodist church and black women’s club leaders who supported federal action) and made her vulnerable to male critics within the CIC. During World War II, she set in motion a series of conferences designed to reinvigorate the CIC; when, instead, they resulted in the organization’s dissolution and replacement by the Southern Regional Council, she was forced into reluctant retirement. From 1944 to 1968, she lived in Try on, North Carolina, active in local Democratic politics and vitally interested in world affairs, but no longer the strong, energetic leader she had been for a quarter of a century.

Ames’s reform career had been deeply shaped by domestic circumstances. As a young widow, the necessity of supporting three children propelled her outside the home. Through the whirlwind of Texas politics in the 1920s and antiracist organizing in the 1930s, she had bent her formidable will to the task of securing a normal life for her crippled youngest child and a medical school education for her son and older daughter. She had nursed her mother through a last illness. She took pride in having played “the double role” of nurturer and breadwinner, matriarch and public figure. Yet she also suffered from the strain. And it was through her public work, and not her private relations, that she achieved her greatest sense of authenticity, that she became most fully herself.

Those who knew her in her latter years remember Jessie Daniel Ames as “animated, positive, and full of determination.” Indeed, the ironic wit, passionate intelligence, and proud self-reliance—forged in a lifetime of striving against inner doubts and external circumstances—stood her in good stead. Nonetheless she could not altogether prevent the antifeminist climate of the 1950s from casting doubt on her unconventional life. Forced out of the public arena, she reworked obsessively the story of her personal relations, dwelling upon her need for proof of others’ love and the self-protective pride that hid that need. By 1968 she had become too crippled by arthritis to live alone, yet still refused to give up her cherished independence. Finally, against her will, she was taken to a nursing home in Austin, where she was cared for by her younger daughter Lulu. She died at the age of eighty-eight.

The principal manuscript collections are the Ames Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the ASWPL Papers in the Atlanta University Library. Smaller holdings are in the Dallas Historical Society and the Texas State Library in Austin. Among Ames’s writings are Southern Women Look at Lynching (1937) and The Changing Character of Lynching (1942). Interviews and correspondence with Lulu Daniel Ames, private family papers, and photographs are in the author’s possession. For a fuller description and bibliography, see J.D. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979). See also H. E. Barber, “The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Georgia (1967), and “The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” Phylon, December 1973; L. H. Crites, “A History of the Association of Southern Women for Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” unpublished Master’s thesis, American University (1965). See also Notable American Women, The Modern Period (1980); W. Dykeman and J. Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (1962); A. F. Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (1970); R. L. Zangrado,. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (1980); and J. S. Reed, “An Evaluation of an Anti-Lynching Organization,” Social Problems, Fall 1968. For the historical context of female reform, see N. F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (1977); M. J. Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (1981); and E. Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979).