Bigoted text messages that are being sent anonymously have spread alarm among Black Americans.
The Federal and state authorities are investigating a wave of bigoted text messages.
These anonymous messages urged recipients in multiple states, including Alabama, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, to report to a plantation to pick cotton.
‘Pick cotton’ is an offensive reference to past enslavement of Black people in the United States.
It is unclear who is behind the reported texts.
It is also not known how many people had received these messages or how the recipients were targeted.
The Federal Communications Commission said on Friday its enforcement bureau was among those probing the incidents.
Lousiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, told Reuters on Friday that her office is among those investigating the text messages.
She has encouraged residents who have received racist spam text messages to contact her office.
Besides some targets, she also received such emails.
Murrill, who is white, said one of the messages hit her personal email box at 8:17 a.m. Friday.
She shared a screenshot of the message with Reuters.
The message greeted her with an ethnic slur and said “Now that trump is President, you have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.”
It read, “Our guys will come get you in a van.”
She said the Federal Bureau of Investigation was also looking into the bigoted messages.
The FBI on Thursday said in a statement it was “aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that it was in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.
“It could be coming from a basement in Baton Rouge, or it could be a basement in Bangladesh,” said Murrill.
“It’s obviously intended to play on people’s emotion in the wake of the election,” she said.
Murrill added,”I’m urging people to rise above it, don’t give these malcontents the benefit of capturing any of emotional bandwidth.”
Monèt Miller, an Atlanta-based publicist, said that many Black Americans responded to her social media post mentioning that she had received a text messages.
Miller received a message telling her to report to her “nearest plantation.”
“To find out that all these African American people are getting it, that was the scariest part about it,” she said.
People in at least 21 states received the texts, including high school and college students, CNN and the Associated Press reported.
“These actions are not normal. And we refuse to let them be normalized,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement from the civil rights organization.
NAACP advocates for racial justice and rights for Black Americans.
“These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country.”
Some Black Americans have said they fear a rollback of civil rights after Republican Donald Trump, who won Tuesday’s presidential election over Democrat Kamala Harris, takes office on January 20.
Trump, who made racist and sexist attacks against his Black opponent, has pledged to end federal diversity and inclusion programmes.
“President Trump’s campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages,” his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement on Friday.
At least some of the messages were distributed via the TextNow messaging service, which enables people to send texts via app, TextNow said.
It said that once they were apprised of the situation, the account or accounts responsible were shut down within an hour.
The bigoted text messages were sent across multiple carriers nationwide in what it called “an attack.”
Some school districts issued warnings and urged students and parents to report any such texts to school staff or local authorities.
The run-up to Tuesday’s election included the biggest rise in U.S. political violence since the 1970s, including some racist attacks on Harris supporters, according to cases identified by Reuters.
