Dear Ida

You bring up two subjects that really resonated with me as they are prevalent still today in the 21st century. Firstly, how deplorable it is that so many black men are being lynched in general. How awful it is too that black men are being lynched for crimes they have not committed, "crimes" that had come at the hands of dishonest white women. Your arguments stand today as well, when dozens of black men are wrongly accused and convicted of rape each year. There is still a stereotype deeply engrained into the minds of many white Americans that a black man is a predatory being who is always guilty.

The other continuity that struck me was that of a sense of desire that white women seem to have for black men. In your time, it seems that some white women had begun to have something of a craving for black men –-a deep fetish driven by the perceived exoticism of the black man.  This attraction by white women to black men seems to exist in the present as well. More and more white women are marrying and having children with black men, though this is not nearly as often the case for black women and white men. Perhaps it is something of this perception of the black man as a violent and hostile that elicits this sense of exoticism, or maybe it is something different.