A wave of racist text messages summoning Black people to report for slavery showed up on phones across the United States, prompting the scrutiny of the FBI. The NAACP said that messages were received in nine states, and attorneys general in two other states reported the same Thursday.

The FBI said in a statement that it was “aware of the offensive and racist text messages” and that it was coordinating with the Justice Department and other federal authorities.

The White House condemned the racist text messages and confirmed federal and state officials were investigating. Federal officials were trying to determine the origin of the messages, which continued to send shock waves through schools across the country Friday.

“Racism has no place in our country — period,” Robyn Patterson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “We strongly condemn these hateful messages and anyone targeting Americans based on their ethnicity or background.”

The texts, which began as early as Wednesday morning, were reported across the South, and from New York to California. The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James said the messages had arrived in phones of middle school, high school and college students in New York City and its suburbs. In a statement, James called the messages “disgusting and unacceptable.”

Some examples of the messages were shared by recipients and reviewed by The New York Times. They followed a pattern: addressing recipients by name, telling them they had been selected to “pick cotton” on a plantation and ordering them to show up at a specific time to be picked up by slave handlers. Some included a reference to President-elect Donald Trump.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign, Steven Cheung, said in an email that the “campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”

Trump stoked racism throughout his campaign in speeches that included false accusations against immigrants and inflated crime figures. He demeaned the intelligence of his opponent, a Black woman; repeatedly amplified a lie that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors’ pets in Ohio; and held a rally near the end of his campaign at Madison Square Garden in New York City that was rife with bigotry and misogyny.

The messages hark back to the most painful past for Black Americans. “Our executive slave owners will come get you in a brown van, be prepared to be searched down once you’ve entered the plantation,” one version said.

Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said in a statement that the messages reflected how racist groups had been emboldened after Trump’s victory, and represented a sharp increase in “vile and abhorrent rhetoric.”

“These actions are not normal,” he said. “And we refuse to let them be normalized.”

The NAACP said people had received versions of the message in Alabama, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. They seemed to circulate heavily on college campuses, but were not limited to colleges, said Alicia Mercedes, a spokesperson for the NAACP. The University of Southern California said in a statement that students on its campus had received hateful messages, and the Ohio attorney general’s office also said it was investigating reports there.

Among other schools targeted were Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, and Howard University in Washington, D.C., two historically Black universities. Howard is the alma mater of Vice President Kamala Harris and hosted her campaign’s watch party Tuesday night and her concession speech Wednesday.

E.J. Hunter said that her daughter, a freshman at Howard, was at home when she received the message Wednesday afternoon, as she prepared to watch Harris’ concession speech. Hunter immediately wondered how the sender got her daughter’s full name.

“Seeing this triggered every ounce of mama bear in me, to want to protect my child,” she said. “I know Kamala said we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work, but I didn’t think it was going to be, literally, on Day 1.”

At Spain Park High School in Hoover, Alabama, at least two students received the messages, said Monique Norwood, a parent whose 14-year-old daughter got the text Wednesday.

“When she read it to me, my mouth dropped,” said Norwood, a retailer, adding that the texts terrified her daughter.

Around 7 a.m. Wednesday, Monèt Miller, a publicist in Atlanta, was still waking up when she saw the message on her phone, complete with her first name and the initial of her last name.

Miller, 29, said she wondered if the message had originated from someone she knew. The message felt, she said, like “something to make me feel cautious as a Black woman in America.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Tim Balk and Erica L. Green
c. 2024 The New York Times Company