Jessie Daniel Ames: Suffragist and Human Rights Activist (Mar 9, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
March is designated as Women’s History Month and perhaps no part of that heritage has been as consequential as the campaign for women’s suffrage. It has always been amazing to me that in this nation founded on the principles of “liberty for all,” for the largest portion of the United States’ existence, there was anything but that. The vast majority of African Americans, of course, were enslaved until 1865, and a good number of free Blacks in the northern states were also denied the vote. People of Mexican descent living within the boundaries of the U.S., even after they became citizens by decree with the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848, still experienced terrible instances of disfranchisement and voter oppression. But the group subject to the most extensive and long-lasting instance of disfranchisement and denial of liberty was the nation’s women, who did not get the expressed right to vote in federal elections until 1920—even though efforts at suppressing women’s votes continued in some areas after that date. That is astounding when we stop and think about it: the United States was founded 244 years ago, but women, in the “land of the free,” have been able to fully vote for just a little over the last one hundred years, despite a long line of women who marched, lobbied, campaigned, and suffered to ensure the right for both genders to receive the full rights of citizenship. One of those who pressed for the right of the franchise was a remarkable Texan: Jessie Harriet Daniel Ames. She not only advocated for votes for women, but she was a leading national figure in the campaign to end the insidious and brutal tactic of the lynching of African Americans in the American South.
Jessie Ames was born in November 1883 in the East Texas hamlet of Palestine, where her father, a railroad station manager, had moved the family shortly before her birth. The family would move two more times following her father’s posting, before settling in Georgetown when Jessie was ten years old. Ms. Ames entered the Ladies Annex of Southwestern University when she was but thirteen (her career began in what we would today call a “preparatory school”) and, rare for a woman in that era, she received a B.A. from there in 1902. After graduation, she moved again with her family to Laredo. There, she entered into what most described as an unhappy marriage with Roger Ames, an army surgeon and friend of her father. Although the marriage produced a son and two daughters, Jessie lived apart from her husband for most of their marriage, choosing not to follow him to army postings overseas. Roger Ames died in 1914, in Guatemala, of a tropical disease, and Ms. Ames never remarried.
Jessie Ames formed her concepts and ideas about injustice early in her life. She witnessed the violence of not only the end of the campaigns against Native Americans, but as a child in East Texas, got an up-close and personal view of the degradation and oppression that the concept of white supremacy dispensed in the effort to subjugate African Americans, including lynching and the segregation of Jim Crow Laws. As she matured in her political ideas, she became a strong proponent of Progressivism, which also expressed to the young woman the limits that a woman could have in righting wrongs in a political system that denied her gender the vote and full participation of citizenship. Jessie Daniel Ames would serve as a fulcrum between feminism and the campaign to end violent oppression against African Americans.
Ames had lived with her parents while her husband was posted abroad, and when her father died in 1911, perhaps due to being out from under his stern Victorian sensibilities, she began to turn toward a career of activism. She became the first president of the Georgetown Equal Suffrage League in 1916, the same year she began to write a weekly newspaper column for the Williamson County Sun. She also became a protégé of state suffrage activist Minnie Fisher Cunningham. Ames became the treasurer of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association in 1918, and she was a key figure in helping make Texas the first southern state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. She moved on to become the founder and first president of the Texas chapter of the League of Women Voters in 1919 and a key advocate for women’s rights in the state and national Democratic Party.
Ames’ social justice crusade did not end with women’s suffrage. She became the field secretary of Will Alexander’s Commission on Interracial Violence in 1924, which focused primarily on ending lynching in the South. She organized campaigns and chapters against lynching in not only Texas but also Arkansas and Oklahoma. Alexander brought her from Texas to Atlanta in 1929 to become the Director of Women’s Work for the Commission, and then in 1930, she independently founded Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and by 1940, the organization had recruited 40,000 members. Ames cultivated contacts within law enforcement, who would alert her to threatened lynching situations. Ames would then “call out” her members, who would congregate, and, often, the mere presence of witnesses to the heinous acts was enough to end the action. She had her life threatened numerous times by white supremacist groups and was even accused by the National Association for the Preservation of the White Race—yes, that was a group—that she “defend[ed] criminal Negro men at the expense of innocent white girls.”
Ames “retired” to the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1943, but her life of service continued. She became the superintendent of Christian Social Relations for the Western Carolina Conference of the Methodist Church and worked in that capacity for more than fifteen years. She returned to Texas in 1968 to live with her daughter in Austin, where she was honored in 1970 as a pioneer of the social justice movement. She died in Austin of pneumonia in February 1972 at the age of 88. A long life devoted to the cause of making sure the United States lived up to its promise of “liberty for all.”
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.