Jessie Daniel Ames (November 2, 1883 – February 21, 1972) was a suffragist and civil rights leader from Texas who helped create the anti-lynching movement in the American South. She was one of the first Southern white women to speak out and work publicly against lynching of African Americans, murders which white men claimed to commit in an effort to protect women's "virtue." Despite risks to her personal safety, Ames stood up to these men and led organized efforts by white women to protest lynchings. She gained 40,000 signatures of Southern white women to oppose lynching, helping change attitudes and bring about a decline in these murders in the 1930s and 1940s. Biography Ames was born Jessie Harriet Daniel in Palestine, Texas, on November 2, 1883. Her mother was Laura Maria Leonard and her father was James Malcolm Daniel. In 1893, the family moved to Georgetown, Texas. Ames was admitted to the Ladies Annex of Southwestern University at the age of 13 and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1902. After graduation, she moved with her family to Laredo, Texas. Ames followed her mother and sister and converted to Methodism despite her father's objection as a nonbeliever. She had joined them in church activities from an early age. In 1905, Ames married Roger Post Ames, a surgeon in the United States Army, who had worked with Walter Reed in Cuba to prove that mosquitoes caused malaria. During much of their unhappy marriage, Roger Ames lived in Central America where he worked as a physician to the American Consul and the United Fruit Company. Roger Ames died in 1914 in Guatemala from blackwater fever. Ames had a son and two daughters, the last of whom was born in 1914 after her husband's death. After the death of her father in 1911, Ames helped her mother run the family's telephone company in Georgetown. She also became involved with several Methodist women's groups. This led to her initial participation in the women's suffrage movement. Suffrage movement and League of Women Voters In 1916, Ames organized the Georgetown Equal Suffrage League and became its first president. She also wrote a weekly suffrage article in the Williamson County Sun newspaper called "Woman Suffrage Notes." Ames became a protégé of Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association (TESA). In 1918, Ames was elected treasurer of the TESA. Texas became the