FBI investigating as racist text messages spam Black students

Black college students in several states, including Texas, reported to authorities Wednesday they had received anonymous text messages using racist references to the era of U.S. slavery. The FBI is investigating the incidents.

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The messages varied in detail, but followed the same basic script, saying the recipient had “been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.”

Officials could not say where the messages originated.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate incidents nationwide, and authorities in Texas, Ohio, Alabama, South Carolina and other states were investigating the messages, which were sent out after the announcement of Donald Trump’s election as president.

It’s unclear who sent the messages and how many were sent. At least some of the messages claimed to have come from “A Trump supporter.”

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Authorities began investigating the text messages after reports that students from Clemson University in South Carolina, Ohio State University, the University of Alabama and other schools had received them.

Students appear to be the primary target of the messages — but not all the recipients were in college.

High school and even middle school students from across the U.S. have reported receiving the malicious messages. A 13-year-old in Austin was among those who received such a message.

“You have been selected to become a slave at your nearest plantation,” the text read. “Please be ready by 12 a.m. with all your necessary belongings. You will be picked up in a white van with a Trump representative from your area.”

“You are in slave group B,” the message continued.

Shaun Hopkins, a Spanish teacher at Small Middle School in Austin, has had some of his students of color — and he knows of other students in the Austin district — who received racist texts asking them to report to a location, he said.

The students receiving the messages didn’t know what to do with them, but some are concerned, he said.

“Kids can’t learn if they’re scared,” Hopkins said.

The texts that Hopkins has seen appear similar to those sent to other students across the county, but some include students’ names in the message, he said. For students of immigrant families, the fear of someone coming to take a family member away could be real, he said.

“For Latino students, the idea of ICE coming into their community, creating some disruptions, is not outlandish,” Hopkins said. “It’s a very real possibility.”

Mary Banks, who has a daughter in Columbus, Ohio, said the 16-year-old received one of the hateful text messages Wednesday evening that included her full name. A few of her daughter’s friends in the Columbus City school district received similar messages, she said.

Banks said she’s not surprised that racist hatred would surface at this moment in history.

“I feel white supremacy got stronger after the election,” she said.

Ohio State University spokesman Ben Johnson told The Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA TODAY Network, that hateful messages were sent to “several students.”

Bethany McCorkle, a spokesperson for Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office, said the office was aware of the text messages and was looking into them.

Columbus NAACP President Nana Watson told the Dispatch that she believes the text messages are a hate crime. 

“This is racism at its highest,” Watson said.

Diedre Simmons, a spokesperson for the University of Alabama, told The Crimson White school newspaper that university officials informed local authorities about similar messages sent to students there. Authorities at Clemson University also are investigating racist text messages sent to Black students in South Carolina, according to the Greenville News, part of the USA TODAY Network.

R.J. Polite, a senior at Clemson who received a version of the text, said he was shocked by the message and mentioned the negativity he’s seeing on social media after Trump’s results.”It was ignorant and kind of childish.” Polite said. “I really tried to stay off of my phone and off the internet for the day because it was just so much going on. It was just bad.” 

It’s unclear who sent the text messages.

Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, said this is the first time she has seen a widespread racist attack using text messages. Tracking the culprit who perpetrated the campaign might be complicated, depending on how extensive it is, she said.

“It remains to be seen how widespread this is,” Caraballo said. “If this is a few hundred texts it could be done by a local racist group in an afternoon as a trolling tactic, but if it’s thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, then it would have to be automated and involve a fair degree of sophistication.”

If the attack is that widespread, Caraballo said, she wouldn’t rule out foreign actors seeking to foment discord in the United States in the days after the presidential election. She said bomb threats to majority Black polling places on Election Day were reported to have come from Russian email addresses.    

Bad actors can quite easily purchase lists of phone numbers — some categorized by race or other demographic characteristics — on the dark web, to be used for anything from sales campaigns to cybercrime, Caraballo said.

In some states voter registration information is public, including a voter’s race, she said, and that information could be combined with phone records to create a targeted attack like this.

An FBI statement said the bureau is “aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.”

The FBI also encouraged people to contact their local law enforcement agencies if they are physically threatened.

Representatives from civil rights advocacy organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP’s Columbus chapter, said the contents of the messages constituted hate crimes.

Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the law center, called them “a public spectacle of hatred and racism that makes a mockery of our civil rights history” in a statement Thursday.

Huang called on political leaders to “condemn anti-Black racism, in any form, whenever we see it.”

Experts on domestic extremism were shocked by the messages Wednesday, telling USA TODAY the campaign appears to represent a tactic that has not previously been employed by white supremacists or hate groups.

“This is the first I’ve ever seen of this kind of racist attack using texts. It’s frighteningly personal and harrowing,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “I’ve also never seen this kind of racist messaging threatening people directly.”

USA TODAY contributed to this report.