The day after the Nov. 5 elections, political strategist and campaign consultant Corryn Freeman had just wrapped up work and turned her focus to doing a live stream on TikTok when she checked her phone and saw a text message from a number she didn’t recognize.
The text read: “Greetings, You have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation. Be ready at 12am November 13, 2024 SHARP with your belongings. Our Exclusive Slaves will come get you in a brown van, be prepared to be searched upon arrival to plantation. No personal belongings allowed this is a fresh start! You are plantation group C.”
Freeman, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, said she was immediately afraid for her well-being.
“I’m immediately like ‘woah, what is this?’ We all get spam messages but nothing telling me that I’ve been selected to be a slave and that I will go to a plantation and pick cotton,” she told the Miami Herald on Monday.
The messages felt intentionally targeted for Freeman because she is a Black woman who works in politics. But when she shared the text online, friends who live in different states said their kids received similar messages.
“This is an effort to create a scare tactic or make some waves, capitalizing on the division that’s happening around the county right now,” said Freeman.
Freeman is one of countless people —primarily Black— who’ve received the messages in several states, including in Alabama, California, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, the Associated Press reported. The messages include variations of what Freeman received.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Federal Communications Commissions have opened investigations into the text messages. “The FBI 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,” a statement from the FBI read. “As always, we encourage members of the public to report threats of physical violence to local law enforcement authorities.”
“These messages are unacceptable. That’s why our enforcement bureau is already investigating and looking into them alongside federal and state law enforcement,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “We take this type of targeting very seriously.”
It is not clear how many messages were sent and why the recipients were targeted, but there has been at least one other person who has gone public in Florida stating they received the message. In Jacksonville, former Director of Community Initiatives for the City of Jacksonville Lakesha Burton shared a screenshot of the text message she received on her Facebook page, NewsJax4 reported.
“This is ignorance at its best,” she wrote when posting the text. “Whoever is behind this has a dark heart and desires to invoke anger, pain and chaos.”
Freeman shared similar sentiments, saying the time of the messages wasn’t a coincidence and that whoever sent the texts is aware of the division in the country.
“I think that whoever it is, whatever entity, for whatever reason, understands the root and knew to send this because they knew the racial inflammatory nature of it would cause waves,” she said. “Whoever is trying to do this is trying to stoke division even more within the country at a very fragile time.”
Freeman said she is fine, but is concerned about her friends’ children. “I care more about them receiving it and them having to process it and figure out what this means,” she said.
Freeman said she’s reported the messages to the Broward County Attorney’s Office and the FBI. She has also encouraged other people to report the messages to the FBI’s tipline.
“I’m confident that something, some action is going to be taken, that an investigation is going to happen,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re going to be able to catch whoever did it, but I believe that the action is being taken to mitigate it, and I think it actually happened pretty swiftly.”
To report the messages, recipients can contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or submitting a tip online at tips.fbi.gov.
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