Black students receive racist text messages across the US

Black students in several states reported to authorities on Wednesday they had received anonymous text messages containing racist references to the era of American slavery.

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

Officials could not say Thursday where the messages came from.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate incidents across the country, and local authorities Ohio, Alabama, South Carolina and other states investigated the messages, which were sent after the announcement of Donald Trump’s election.

It is unclear who sent the messages and how many were sent. At least some of the messages are said to have come from “a Trump supporter.”

A statement of the FBI said the agency “is aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals across the country and is in contact with the Department of Justice and other federal authorities regarding this matter.”

Representatives of civil rights groups, including the SPLC and the Columbus chapter of the NAACP, said the content of the messages constituted hate crimes.

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

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

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

“This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of racist attack using text – it’s terrifyingly personal and harrowing,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “I have also never seen these types of racist messages directly threaten people.”

Where do students receive racist text messages?

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

But not all of the recipients were in college.

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

Banks said she isn’t surprised that racist hatred is surfacing at this point in history.

“I feel like white supremacy has become stronger after the election,” she said.

Ben Johnson, a spokesman for Ohio State University, told The Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, that hateful messages have been 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 investigating them.

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

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

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

RJ Polite, a senior at Clemson who received a version of the text, said he was shocked by the message and mentioned the negativity he sees on social media following Trump’s results. “It was ignorant and a bit childish.” Politely said. “I really tried to stay off my phone and the internet all day because there was so much going on. It was just bad.”

Who sends the messages?

It is 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 down the perpetrator who carried out the campaign could be complicated depending on how extensive it is, she said.

That is also unclear.

“It remains to be seen how widespread this is,” Caraballo said. “If this is a few hundred text messages it could be done in an afternoon by a local racist group as a troll tactic, but if it is thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people then it should be automated and a fair fight to entail. degree of sophistication.”

If the attack is so widespread, Caraballo says, she does not rule out that foreign actors may want to stir up discord in the United States in the days after the presidential election. she said bomb threats to the majority of black polling places on election day would come from Russian email addresses.

Bad actors can quite easily purchase lists of phone numbers — some categorized by race or other demographics — on the dark web, to use for everything from sales campaigns to cybercrime, Caraballo said.

In some states where 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 account like this.

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.