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.

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.

[3] 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.

She was an officer of the Joint Legislative Council in Texas, also known as the Petticoat Lobby, and was on the Board of Education of the Women's Division of the Methodist Church.

[2] The project to create a home and training school for delinquent African American girls was one of the few instances of interracial cooperation among Texas women.

The Texas legislature passed a bill in 1927 creating the home and school for delinquent black girls but made no appropriations.

[5] In 1930, Ames, with the CIC's financial help, founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) with headquarters in Atlanta.

Despite encountering hostile opposition and threats of violence, the women conducted petition drives, lobbying and fundraising across the South to work against lynching.

[6] Pledge: 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...[P]ublic opinion has accepted too easily the claim of lynchers and mobsters that they are acting solely in defense of womanhood.

In light of the facts we dare no longer to permit this claim to pass unchallenged, nor allow those bent upon personal revenge and savagery to commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had created the Anti-Lynching Crusaders in 1922 to mobilize support for the Dyer Bill.

Senator Tom Connally of Texas used a letter written to him from Ames to show widespread Southern opposition to the federal bill.