Born in Texas in 1883, Jessie Daniel Ames challenged the notion that White women like her needed protection from African-American men. Pointing out that the alleged rapes that supposedly resulted in lynchings virtually never happened and that racial hatred was the real reason why lynchings occurred, she founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in 1930. Facing down belligerence and threats of all kinds, Ames sent thousands of women into towns throughout the south to educate and organize and even badger sheriffs into signing an oath that they would protect their prisoners from mobs -- no matter what. An in-your-face woman will even get in a sheriff's face.
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