The FBI is investigating racist messages sent to black people across the US

Authorities are investigating racist text messages sent to black Americans across the country telling them to report to the fields to “pick cotton”.

Black Americans, including high school and college students, were among the recipients in states including Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania.

“The FBI is aware of offensive and racist messages being sent to people across the country and is in contact with the Department of Justice and other authorities regarding this matter,” the agency said.

The messages appear to have started on Wednesday, the day after election day. Some of the messages mentioned the Trump campaign – which has strongly denied any connection.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the campaign, said: “The campaign has nothing to do with these messages.”

The source of the anonymous messages and the total number sent are unclear.

A 42-year-old mother in Indiana sent a copy of the documents found by her high school daughter to the BBC.

The messages said the daughter had been “chosen to be a slave in the fields near you” and would be “picked up in a white van” and “searched thoroughly once you reach your destination”.

The woman, who asked not to be named for her safety, called the messages “very scary” and made her feel “really vulnerable”.

“It’s because of American history, but the timing is specific to the day after the election,” he said. “This should have been a strategic effort.”

Another recipient, Hailey Welch, he told the University of Alabama’s student newspaper that several students on campus also received the messages.

“At first I thought it was a joke, but everyone gets them. People were sending messages, writing their stories, saying they found them,” Ms. Welch told the Crimson White newspaper. “I was just depressed, and I was scared because I didn’t know what was going on.”

The wording of the messages varied but often instructed recipients to report to “the farm” or wait to be picked up by a van, and referred to “slavery” work.

In a statement, Derrick Johnson, head of the NAACP, said: “These actions are unusual.”

“These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and hate speech from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and fan the flames of fear that many of us feel after Tuesday’s election results,” Johnson said.

Jessica Rosenworcel, who chairs the Federal Communications Commission, which is also investigating these messages, said: “These messages are unacceptable. We take this type of targeting very seriously.”

In many states, senior law enforcement officials said they were aware of the messages and encouraged citizens to report them to authorities if they received them.

The Nevada attorney general’s office said it was working to “investigate the origin of what appear to be robo-messages”.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said police from the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation traced some of the messages to a virtual private network — a way to hide the origin of electronic communications — based in Poland.

Murrill said investigators “didn’t find a real source – meaning it could have come from any bad actor situation in the region or in the world”.

The Indiana mother has hit back at reports that the messages may have come from abroad, telling the BBC: “It doesn’t make it any safer or better that it could be outside.”

“They know how Americans think,” he said, adding that if the reports are true, foreign actors “know what divides us, what kills us, and what can destroy us”.