Jim Crow Stories: People

Jessie Daniel Ames

Jessie was a Texas suffragist and civil-rights activist who fought against mobbing blacks in the South. She believed that it was women's responsibility to solve racial problems. Ames created the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Ames successfully rallied the support of thousands of African American women and hundreds of public officials for her anti-lynching campaign. Ames ordered white southern women to go out and persuade sheriffs and judges to sign a petition that would do everything in their power to protect their prisoners. Women's went into communities where there had been lynching which put them in great danger. For the first time since the Civil War, no lynchings occurred for an entire year.

Ned Cobb

Ned Cobb was a farmer living in Tallapoosa county, Alabama. He joined the sharecroppers Union to fight for justice for black people and oppose white landowners treating blacks unfairly. Cobb saw the communists as the heirs to the abolitionists who came to the South during the Civil War. When a sheriff tried to foreclose on a friend of Cobb, he defended his friend. Cobb was involved in a shoot out which wounded him. He was also arrested and offered less time if he names some of his fellow Union workers. He refused and was put in jail for 13 years.