Jessie Daniel Ames: Anti-lynching activist

Jessie’s work: National attention comes her way

Only a few years after women’s suffrage passed in Texas, it was crystal clear to Jessie that racism and violence against people of color were the top priorities. It stood in the way of so many of the things she’d hoped to address in legislation to improve conditions for women, children, and needy communities.

Jessie’s work on racial equity had attracted the attention of groups addressing racial issues. In 1922, the Atlanta-based regional Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) asked Jessie to chair the women’s committee of the newly formed Texas Interracial Commission. The Women’s Committee arose from CIC through the efforts of director Carrie Parks Johnson and Lugenia Burns Hope.

Atlanta activist Lugenia Burns Hope

Lugenia was a powerhouse in improving the Atlanta Black community with this Neighborhood House she started and more.

The CIC’s Women’s Committee united the frustrations of white Christian women who wanted to work on racial justice issues and work together with black women. Over the past few decades, women of many denominations had become backbones of their churches, doing extensive work that kept local places of worship flourishing and missions staffed abroad. But they were shut out of leadership in their own churches because they were women. So they felt freer to speak out against racism and other injustices, and their calls for meaningful actions were on the rise.

Heck-raising church woman Thelma Stevens

Thelma Stevens of Mississippi is one such fightin’ church woman. Horrified at lynchings as a girl, Thelma worked at a community center for African-Americans after college and fought segregation that was strong within the Methodist Church. With the Methodist Women’s Division, she hired Black female attorney and minister Pauli Murray to document all the Jim Crow laws in the US. Murray’s work is credited as foundational to the successful outcome of the Brown vs the Board of Education case outlawing school segregation in 1954.

Attorney and minister Pauli Murray

At CIC, Jessie quickly became respected for her strategy of personal outreach to church women, involving their groups in examining black living conditions in their own communities and working with Black people to get better housing and education. Jessie had experienced less success with secular women’s groups, so she believed that the mandate to “love your neighbor as yourself” would touch a religious nerve among church women. She utilized all kinds of education, writing numerous booklets and pamphlets like this one and editorials. She had church groups put on plays about the need for interracial harmony.

Jessie put things plainly in her talking and writing, not avoiding issues such as lynching and mob violence. She paid a price: She got loads of hateful anonymous letters accusing her of betraying her color caste and being an advocate to subjugate whites under blacks. One writer warned: “God will burn . . . the Big African Brute in Hot Hell for molesting our God-like pure snowwhite angelic American Women.”

Mrs. Andrews, White Preservationist

Many hatefilled letters expressed beliefs similar to Mrs. J. E. Andrews, who founded the National Association for the Preservation of the White Race. Andrews was vicious and vocal to Jessie and her work, in print and in person. After viewing an anti-lynching play Jessie presented, Mrs. Andrews stormed up to her and told her she would slap her face for just a nickel. Jessie replied: "Well, I have a nickel.”

Jessie began doing her own lynching investigations and giving information to law enforcement. She prevailed on her newspaper contacts not to sensationalize and condone mob violence.

In 1928, Jessie was offered the job of heading the national Women’s Committee for CIC, and she moved to CIC headquarters in Atlanta. She and her mother had sold the Georgetown telephone company to Southwestern States Telephone Company. Corporate consolidation made it hard for small telephone businesses to stay competitive.

Once in her job in Atlanta, Jessie saw that CIC would be a great platform to launch an anti-lynching organization for all the southern states. She started the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in 1930. Lynching was once again on the rise, including the vicious lynching in that year of farmhand George Hughes in Sherman, Texas.

George Hughes and sheriff

Hughes was accused of allegedly assaulting the wife of his boss when he came to collect $6 owed him. Hughes suffocated when a mob burned down the courthouse where he was in custody. The mob then dragged his body behind a car to the thriving black district of Sherman. They mutilated his body, hung it, and burned it, as well as burning down the entire Black district of Sherman.

Not only was lynching on the rise in Texas and the South, the callousness of lynching collaborators was on the rise. In nearby Taylor in 1933, Caldwell Washington argued with a white coworker and gave him a flesh wound with a pocketknife. Washington fled before even finding out the extent of the injury, with good reason. Two months later, his body was found hanging from a tree, hands bound behind his back. The Williamson District Attorney, D. B. Wood, ruled the death a “suicide.”

Caldwell Washington’s lynching called “a suicide.”

In 2018, Washington’s descendants held a service to commemorate Washington, victim of that mockery of justice. Johnnye Mae Washington-Patterson, Washington’s adopted daughter who was now 85 years old, recalls the impact of the lynching on her mother. Her mother would talk of the horror of seeing her husband’s body hanging, so decomposed that she was only able to recognize him by his wedding ring.

Johnnye Mae Washington-Patterson recalls her mother’s memories of the lynching.

Washington is remembered and memorialized at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The Memorial documents and honors the thousands of lynching victims with several projects, including the Soil Collection Project, which features collections of soil from sites of a lynching. A group of Georgetown area racial justice advocates took soil from the lynching site near Taylor to the Memorial.

Jessie’s antilynching work was built upon the vast and sustained work of black women and groups such as the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Journalist Ida B. Wells began her extensive anti-lynching work in the 1880s, and women such as Mary McLeod Bethune, educator and founder of the National Council of Negro Women, were on the forefront of a huge movement of women in clubs and community groups and churches fighting against racial hate and violence as well as improving working conditions and education.

Journalist Ida B. Wells fought against lynching.

Mary McLeod Bethune organized thousands of black women against lynching and other violence.

By 1910, the NAACP amplified that work by promptly responding to lynchings with accurate information and putting pressure on local authorities. Women in the NAACP started a national women’s group called the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, shown here marching in New York City. By 1922, hundreds of black women were lobbying for state and federal anti-lynching laws.

Black women march against lynching in New York City.

Black anti-lynching activists had long noted that lynching was often done with the guise of “protecting our white women.” Some Black leaders called for white women to take responsibility for changing that lie. The lie was constantly reinforced, notably in the 1915 blockbuster movie Birth of a Nation (scenes shown below). A key focal point of the movie is an attempted rape by a Black man of a white woman who is then rescued by her Klan savior, who whips his hood back to reveal his heroic visage.

Jessie totally agreed with this viewpoint. She blamed the twisted logic of “chivalry” for fueling most lynching of Black men. Lynching “protected” helpless white women against rapacious, violent black men. This purported threat also kept white women under the thumb of their white “protectors.” And the very real and omnipresent threat of lynching and other violent and repressive acts toward all Blacks from whites served very well to keep Black people perpetually fearful and economically exploited.

White women must take the lead to stop lynchings, Jessie said. In the ASWPL statement of purpose, Jessie wrote: “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 . . . public opinion has accepted too easily the claim of lynchers and mobsters that they were acting solely in the defense of womanhood. In the light of facts, this claim can no longer be used as a protection to those who lynch.”

Jessie intentionally kept membership to white women. She believed that it was not the Black woman’s burden to change white men, and she noted that fighting lynching is extra dangerous for Blacks. She was also mindful that whenever Black people are involved in an organization or cause, white resistance goes up.

She sought out the counsel of Black advisors, including her closest allies from CIC, Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Helen Burroughs, suffragist and activist who founded the National Training School for Women and Girls. (In the photo below of an ASWPL meeting in 1939, Mary is next to Jessie on the right, front row).

But these two allies and other Black people disagreed with the whites-only stance. They urged Jessie to include Black women in her organization, as did some members of large Black organizations. But Jessie believed that white women could best pressure white husbands, white churches, white law enforcement, and white lawmakers and business leaders that lynching was wrong and immoral and needed to stop.

Jessie began pulling together a network of women in clubs and churches throughout the former Confederate southern states, getting women to sign pledges to oppose lynching, and get their local and state law enforcement officers, religious leaders, and politicians to sign anti-lynching pledges.

She supplied them with lynching facts and info on “What One Woman Can Do” to stop lynching. She showed them how to send a powerful message by gathering lots of names on anti-lynching petitions that would be sent to local and state legislators and law enforcement. Not only did the high numbers of petition names show how widespread the anti-lynching sentiment was, it also sent the message that if a lawmaker or sheriff were to take righteous but politically risky actions against lynching, these voters would support him at the polls.

Jessie trained women to investigate lynchings to get the real facts, and to try to gain the trust of the Black community to get their views and their information on lynchings. She and member Dorothy Tilly of Georgia would drive hundreds of miles down dirt roads in areas hostile toward Blacks and white allies to get true lynching information.

Dorothy Tilly helped Jessie track down the truth about lynchings.

Jessie used the extensive research she and others had done to show women how lynchings that claimed alleged assaults on white women were often instead issues of unpaid wages, “too much” Black success, or an innocent victim selected to cover up a white perpetrator. As Jessie writes, lynching justificants sometimes come down to the victim “not knowing his place” or “improper conduct and insulting language”—conduct and language defined by the lynchers, of course.

Thousands of pledges rolled in; by 1942, pledges numbered 43,000. And the local networks were effective. Many newspapers trumpeted the cause of the ASWPL, though others did not. Listen to the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph in November, 1930.  The women “may be able to do what men have not done, because they were too apathetic or too timid: force the sheriffs into fulfillment of their oaths to protect their prisoners. The Telegraph long ago came to the conclusion that in nine cases out of ten, at least, lynchings were due to cowardice on the part of some civil officer.”

In 1939, Mississippi ASWPL chair Bessie Alford learned of lynching plans underway for two black defendants in Prentiss awaiting trial. Bessie started at the top and called the governor and kept calling everyone else she knew from the sheriff to the highway patrol to ward off the mob. Jessie got her press contacts to cover the mob intents. Then—whaddayaknow?—the mayor announced that there would be no lynching in Prentiss—and there wasn’t.

Mississippi state capitol—Bessie started with calling the governor and kept going.

In a Georgia case in Schley County, Jessie learned on Christmas Day, 1934, from an Associated Press reporter ally that a mob was forming for a black man accused of murder. She phoned Mary Addie Mullino, head of the South Georgia Conference of the Methodist Woman’s Missionary Society and a ASWPL supporter. Mary Addie phoned the sheriff and all her contacts who ran things at the Schley County courthouse and local law enforcement, urging them to stop the lynching. Abandoning her Christmas dinner, she stayed at the phone until the man was in safe custody.

Women prevented a lynching in Schley County by dogging county authorities to do their job.

The ASWPL and CIC gave awards to women who took steps to prevent lynching. Here’s one for Mrs. J. C. Butler, who took over her sheriff husband’s job in his absence.

Lifting the veil of secrecy about lynchings, Jessie noted, is a powerful tool that could shame authorities into action. And as she and her members reminded business owners and chambers of commerce, lynchings gave the South a bad image during a time when many businesses were looking to expand in the South. Some white business leaders agreed. Houston financier Jesse H. Jones (at left below) decried the lynching of Robert Powell as "a blot on the good name of Texas." The horrific murder rocked Houston just as Jones had commissioned a coliseum he hoped would attract the Democratic national convention.

The AWSPL would praise those who followed through on their pledges, such as the 1,355 Louisiana peace officers who signed the anti-lynching pledge following presentations given by Ruth Knox, a reticent church choir director who recalled being terrified to make a public presentation. In one year alone, the officers protected prisoners from threatening mobs in 40 incidences, Jessie reported.

ASWPL women kept on law enforcement like these Louisiana officers to stop violence.

And ASWPL women called out those who allowed violence. In a publicity campaign, their publication titled, “Where Were the Peace Officers?”, listed the names of every sheriff who failed to uphold his oath of office, detailing his complicity in the death or assault of a Black suspect or prisoner.

While ASWPL did its work, black organizations such as the NAACP and most black women’s groups were focusing their efforts to get a federal anti-lynching law. Local efforts were too slow at getting change in the South, they reasoned.

But Jessie disagreed. She thought that federal mandates would be met with the same staunch resistance and backlash as Reconstruction was. She believed that any anti-lynching bill would pass the US House and then southern senators would defeat it. Only sustained local accountability would eventually change minds, she insisted.

The division was felt among the ASWPL members as well. Many members echoed rising public sentiment nationwide that supported stronger federal measures to stop lynching. Protests were ramping up after decades of lynching inaction, with marches from city streets to the White House. Jessie’s Black allies tried to convince her to support federal anti-lynching legislation. But Jessie thought her way, the Southern-woman-led, local approach was best.

Sadly, Jessie was correct that federal anti-lynching legislation would indeed, always get voted down in the Senate because of southern opposition. All 200-some bills failed throughout the years, typically defeated in filibusters led by southern senators such as liberal segregationist Tom Connally of Texas.

Emmett Till and his body in the open casket that his mother insisted on so that people could see lynching’s result

The latest version of an antilynching bill, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, is named after Emmett Till, a Mississippi Black teen who was brutally tortured and murdered after a white woman said that he had whistled at her, grabbed her, and verbally threatened her. (A few years ago, she admitted that Till had never touched or threatened her; his “whistle” may have been a result of his lisp.) His mother insisted on an open casket so that everyone could see what his bloated, tortured body looked like. The bill passed the US House in 2020, but was held up by … can you guess?...a southern senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act finally passed just this March, and was signed by President Joe Biden.

President Biden signs anti-lynching bill with Michelle Duster (right), great-granddaughter of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells and Vice President Kamala Harris at left.

In 1942, Jessie quietly dissolved ASWPL. She had seen lynch mob violence decrease over the organization’s years, and she had seen thousands of Southern women empowered to take on change in their communities. She turned back to her CIC work, but in the meantime, other organizations had also taken on interracial work. More importantly, black organizations had grown in power and influence, and many bypassed interracial groups where black-white power-sharing may well be elusive.

CIC changed its name and focus in 1943 and became the Southern Regional Council. Jessie was not asked to continue. In 1944, she moved to a cottage called “Wren’s Nest” in tiny Tryon, North Carolina.

Jessie did not, however, “retire.” She lined her cottage with books, and subscribed to legions of magazines, and fired off letters and editorials on a wide range of topics. Just one of scores of missives is this prescient 1965 editorial included in SU’s Special Collection of Jessie’s papers. In this letter, she eviscerates the American Medical Association for opposing the funding of loans for a successful rural health program, using a seasoned blend of facts, sharp analysis, and wit. She writes that the AMA representative “made no objection to our including in loans medical care for mules—only for people did he object.”

Jessie gathered a women’s study group of world affairs and got involved in social issues with the regional Methodist conference. And she used her women’s network to register Black voters and organize precinct by precinct to wrest control of the county Democratic party from the corrupt courthouse gang

Jessie worked on many iterations of an autobiography, though none were finished and published. Sadly, her important work was lost in the shuffle during the tumult of the ‘60s struggles, and crippling arthritis prompted her to come back to Texas to live with her daughter Lulu in Austin. Jessie spent her last four years in an Austin nursing home near Lulu. She died on Feb. 21, 1972. Had she known as she lay dying, she would have been pleased to know that Congresswoman Bella Abzug of New York was invoking Jessie in her address to women leaders of Southern Methodism. Urging them toward a broad conception of their political responsibilities, Abzug told them that she could find no closer analogy for such a goal as the work of Jessie and the ASWPL.

Jessie Daniel Ames, like all of us, was a complicated woman and one with faults and blind spots. She was stubborn, goal-oriented, and opinionated—you know, compliments when it’s a male leader—and that could sometimes put off potential allies. Her dedication to her goals stressed her family relationships with her three children. But there is no question that she carried the torch with great courage and acumen. Jessie Daniel Ames made the world much better here in Georgetown and far beyond.