The FBI has opened an investigation into racist text messages sent to Black men, women and students across the country instructing them to get ready to show up and “pick cotton.”

The text messages included the receivers’ names and all had similar wording, instructing them to show up on a specific date with their belongings, that they had been “selected to pick cotton” and would be picked up in a van, CNN reported.

College students at Ohio State, Clemson University, the Univesity of Alabama, Fisk University and Missouri State University were targeted. Some texts were sent to children as young as middle school age, The Associated Press reported.

“The racist nature of these text messages is extremely disturbing, made even more so by the fact that children have been targeted,” Lower Merion School District acting superintendent Megan Shafer said in a letter to parents. Six middle school students in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania got the messages, the AP reported.

People in at least 12 states, including New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and the District of Columbia received the messages, CNN reported.

Officials do not know the identity of the person or persons who sent the messages, USA Today reported. However, CNN reported they came from a company called TextNow in what the company “believe(s) ... is a widespread, coordinated attack.”

TextNow allows people to sign up for accounts anonymously using an email address to send messages from a randomly generated phone number, CNN reported.

“As soon as we became aware, our Trust & Safety team acted quickly, rapidly disabling the related accounts in less than an hour,” TextNow said in a statement to CNN.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said on X the state’s Bureau of Investigation traced some of the messages to a VPN in Poland. They are still looking for the originating source.

The wireless trade group CTIA said providers know about the messages and “are aggressively working to block them and the numbers that they are coming from,” CNN reported.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the group Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said she has never seen something like this before.

“This is the first I’ve ever seen of this kind of racist attack using texts – it’s frighteningly personal and harrowing,” Beirich told USA Today. “I’ve also never seen this kind of racist messaging threatening people directly.”

“It remains to be seen how widespread this is,” Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic 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.”

Caraballo said phone lists are accessible on the dark web and some are categorized by various characteristics including race. Some voter registration information is also public and can be combined with phone records.

She said it may not be domestic but could be from someone from outside of our country trying to sow discord in the U.S. after the presidential election, USA Today reported.

“The threat — and the mention of slavery in 2024 — is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said, according to the AP. “These actions are not normal. And we refuse to let them be normalized.”

Margaret Huang, CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, released a statement on Thursday that called the messages “a public spectacle of hatred and racism that makes a mockery of our civil rights history,” USA Today reported. She called on leaders to “condemn anti-Black racism, in any form, whenever we see it.”

The FBI is working with the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. The Ohio Attorney General’s office is also investigating, as is D.C.’s Metropolitan Police’s intelligence unit.

©2024 Cox Media Group