Black People Across the US Received Texts Saying They’d Been “Selected to Pick Cotton” Following the Election

One day after the presidential election, and in the days following, Black people across the country, reportedly as young as middle schoolers, received text messages addressing them by name and telling them that they would be transported to plantations to work as slaves and “pick cotton.”

While the exact language of the messages vary slightly, most appear to tell recipients that they have been “selected“ or “chosen” to perform cotton picking, i.e. work that was historically performed by enslaved people in the American South. Many were told that they would be picked up by a van and then searched.

The messages are said to have been received by people, many of whom are Black college students, in at least 17 states, including Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Nevada, California, Ohio, South Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, and Alabama. The New York Times reported that the Louisiana attorney general’s office traced the messages “to an encrypted virtual private network originating in Poland,” though Liz Murrill, the state’s AG, told the outlet that because the network was “masking” the sender, it could have come from “anywhere in the world.” The FBI said Thursday that the agency “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.”

According to The Washington Post, “Some, though not all, of the messages claimed to be from a Trump supporter or ‘the Trump administration,’ according to screenshots shared on social media and local news.” In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign said: “The campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”

There isn’t really any reason to believe that the actual Trump campaign is connected to the texts, a move that would be pretty stupid. Yet even if Team Trump did not press Send on the messages, critics of the former and soon-to-be current president believe he gave racists the green light to engage in openly racist behavior. In a statement, NAACP president Derrick Johnson said the slavery texts show how Trump‘s victory has emboldened racists and reflects an increase in “vile and abhorrent rhetoric.” Arleta McCall, the mother of a University of Alabama student who received one of the texts, told the Post that Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail “kind of set the tone,” adding: “People who are racist, it gives them the feeling that it’s okay to be publicly racist because my leader, my president, goes up there and says whatever he wants to say.”

While running for president for the third time, Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats, suggested that Kamala Harris, who is biracial, only recently became Black, repeatedly demeaned Harris’s intelligence, and held a rally at Madison Square Garden where one of the speakers called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” and make a “joke” about a Black man in the audience carving a watermelon for Halloween. One day later, the Trump campaign spoke out against the Puerto Rico line—but nothing else that was said.

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