HUMBLE, TX – Humble ISD police investigating text messages reported sent to a student at West Lake Middle School Wednesday.
“Counseling services have been made available to the student, and the police are investigating,” said the district spokesperson in a statement to KPRC 2. “This type of spam is extremely disturbing and disheartening.”
Recommended Videos
The district said they’re only aware of one student receiving the messages. However, the student’s parent, who does not want to be identified, tells KPRC 2′s Rilwan Balogun, her daughter shared other Black and Latino students received similar messages.
The parent tells Balogun, her middle schooler has received several calls from an unidentified number and multiple messages.
The first text came just before 7 o’clock Wednesday morning as the student was on the phone with her grandmother.
“My mom told her not to respond and for her not to be discouraged by the racism in others, saying, ‘people will be people,’” the parent said.
A second message came an hour later, from a different number, with similar sentiments.
“It’s disgusting,” the mother said during a phone interview.
Humble ISD Statement
“A student has reported receiving two offensive text messages. We are aware from media coverage that these messages have been received by individuals nationwide. Counseling services have been made available to the student, and the police are investigating. This type of spam is extremely disturbing and disheartening.”
FBI and FCC investigating texts nationwide
Across the country, dozens of Black people have reported receiving the same text message, according to NBC News. Many are college students from schools across the country.
The FBI told NBC it is aware of the texts and is in contact with the U.S. Department of Justice. The agency is asking people who receive the text to report it to their local police.
The Federal Communications Commission said it’s looking into the racist texts as well.
About six middle school students in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, received the messages too, said Megan Shafer, acting superintendent of the Lower Merion School District.
“The racist nature of these text messages is extremely disturbing, made even more so by the fact that children have been targeted,” she wrote in a letter to parents.
Students at some major universities, including Clemson in South Carolina and the University of Alabama, said they received the messages. The Clemson Police Department said in a statement that it been notified of the “deplorable racially motivated text and email messages” and encouraged anyone who received one to report it.
Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, issued a statement calling the messages that targeted some of its students “deeply unsettling.” It urged calm and assured students that the texts likely were from bots or malicious actors with “no real intentions or credibility.”
Nick Ludlum, a senior vice president for the wireless industry trade group CTIA, said “wireless providers are aware of these threatening spam messages and are aggressively working to block them and the numbers that they are coming from.”
David Brody, director of the Digital Justice Initiative at The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that they aren’t sure who is behind the messages but estimated they had been sent to more than 10 states, including most Southern states, Maryland, Oklahoma and even the District of Columbia. The district’s Metropolitan Police force said in a statement that its intelligence unit was investigating the origins of the message.
Brody said a number of civil rights laws can be applied to hate-related incidents. The leaders of several other civil rights organizations condemned the messages, including Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who said, “Hate speech has no place in the South or our nation.”
“The threat — and the mention of slavery in 2024 — is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness,” said NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson. “These actions are not normal. And we refuse to let them be normalized.”
