An update of posts from June 18th, 2018 and June 18th, 2020 Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, Presbyterian Minister John Rankin and Levi Coffin, worked tirelessly — in many cases even in defiance of the law — to free Black men and women from bondage in the United States. Then on January 1st, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln ratified the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all enslaved persons in the Confederate States of America in rebellion and not in Union hands were to be freed. It appeared that the institution known as slavery had been defeated. Shockingly, some enslaved African Americans had no idea that President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which mandated that they be set free. In Texas, more than two-and-a-half years passed before they attained the knowledge of their freedom. For 30 months, African American slaves in Texas were free — but did not know it. They were no longer under the law of slavery, yet th...