Dozens of black people across the country reported receiving text messages informing them that they had been “selected” to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation.”

The messages came just hours after the polarized presidential election concluded this week.

On Wednesday morning, Monèt Miller, an Atlanta journalist, was reeling from Donald Trump’s victory in the White House when she received a text message from an unknown phone number.

“Our executive slaves will pick you up in a brown van,” the message read, “be prepared to be searched once you enter the plantation.”

Miller, 29, was shocked. She wondered how the person got her phone number and if she was being monitored. Panicked, she replied, “Who is that?!” I’m going to find out who you are” and shared a photo of the text on social networks. She learned that some of her friends had received the same text message.

“It’s a scare tactic,” Miller said in an interview. “I saw it and I was like, ‘What in this world is going on?’ Usually in every other case, someone is racist to the point that it’s funny, it’s kind of a bad mood, kind of funny. But that day, with the weather and everything that was happening, I was really scared. »

Black social media users across the country reported receiving text messages similar to Miller’s. Most of the recipients are students from a wide range of schools across the country, including The Ohio State University, Clemson University in South Carolina, the University of Southern California and the University of Missouri State, NBC News confirmed.

Domonique Valles, 23, who attends the University of Southern California, said he and some of his classmates in the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity received the text messages and have since filed a complaint with the FBI.

“I definitely don’t feel safe on campus,” Valles said. Although he said he’s not sure what the campus can do to make people feel safe, “they definitely need to at least support the people who are suffering in this black community.”

In a statement, the university called the messages “hateful and unacceptable” and added that it referred students who received them to the campus Office of Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX.

The FBI said in a statement Thursday that it was aware of the texts, had been in contact with the U.S. Department of Justice and was encouraging people who received them to report the messages to local law enforcement authorities. of law enforcement.

Various Clemson University students have reported receive SMScausing a public statement of school. “These numbers have been determined to be associated with online identity theft sites.” Campus police are “actively investigating the matter and working with state partners to identify the source of the messages,” the statement read in part.

It is not clear who is behind these mass text messages, what motivated them, or how they obtained the phone numbers of many black people. But some of the anonymous numbers appear to be linked to TextNow, a text messaging service that allows users to obtain untraceable “burner” phone numbers.

A TextNow spokesperson told NBC News in a statement that it was aware of the messages. “As soon as we became aware of this, our Trust & Safety team acted quickly, closing the affected accounts in less than an hour,” the statement said. “TextNow is proud to be an inclusive service offering free texting and mobile data to millions of Americans. We do not condone or condone the use of our service to send harassing or spam messages and will work with authorities to prevent such people from doing so in the future.

The Virginia Attorney General’s Office condemned the messages Wednesday and ordered anyone who “believes they are under threat” to contact law enforcement. Police departments and city leaders across the country have also been addressing the situation.

People as young as high school students, and some beyond college, also received these messages, which began streaming the morning after Election Day. Some of messages mention Donald Trump.

The Trump campaign’s Brian Hughes denounced the texts and said it was “absolutely absurd” to link the president to the messages.

“If we can find the origin of these posts that promote this kind of ugliness in our name, we will obviously take legal action to stop it,” Hughes said in a statement to NBC News.

“President Trump has built a diverse and broad coalition of support, with voters of all races and backgrounds,” he added. “The result was a landslide victory for his mandate for common sense change. This will result in a second mandate that will benefit all workers in our country.

Some recipients responded to the texts with anger and others with a sense of humor, but many agree that the messages appear to be dark foreshadowing. The NAACP condemned the messages, saying they were a product of the president-elect’s rhetoric.

“The sad reality of electing a president who has historically embraced and sometimes encouraged hatred is unfolding before our eyes,” the statement read.

Although college students appeared to be the most targeted by the texts, Black people of varying ages reported receiving the messages. Corryn Freeman, 35, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said she and her friends’ high school students received the messages. She said that if the text messages constitute a massive spam operation, it may signal danger to recipients because “our collective security is potentially at risk.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is happening just a day after Donald Trump was elected,” Freeman told NBC News. “I think the election has reignited and inflamed people who have racist tendencies to come forward and speak out. I think it’s intentional to scare people of color, black people, into a reality that we don’t want to return to.

Black Democrats weren’t the only recipients of the text messages. John Anthony, a black Republican who hosts a conservative radio show in Illinois, said he received the message Wednesday afternoon and immediately attributed it to a left-wing ploy.

“They tried to make it look like it was from Trump or the Republicans,” Anthony said of the message, adding that he believed the message came from a “left-wing organization” hoping to sow racial discord. “This is the beginning of a ‘let’s take on Trump and his supporters’ attitude. That’s what I got out of it.

The Federal Communications Commission said in a statement that it was aware of the messages and was “investigating them alongside federal and state law enforcement.”

A spokesperson for CTIA, the official trade association representing the wireless communications industry, told NBC News in a statement that several wireless carriers have been affected by mass texting and that the association “pushes back aggregators who have been running SMS campaigns like this from the start. »

The text messages appeared to have calmed down Thursday evening, but Miller said she feared they were just the beginning of a racist targeting attack.

“Now people are testing the limits of their ability to play with people,” she said. “I definitely see that this is just the beginning…I just feel like we will be attacked more in person in the future rather than behind phone screens.”