Galveston Juneteenth & the Thomas Family Legacy: Attorney911 Explores the 1865 Reading of General Order No. 3, John Fluker Thomas’s Enslavement in Michel B. Menard’s Household, and the Multi-Generational Advocacy That Made Juneteenth a Texas State Holiday in 1979 and a Federal Holiday in 2021 — An Educational Article from The Manginello Law Firm, 1-888-ATTY-911
The Thomas Brothers of Galveston and the Man Who Stood in the Street on June 19, 1865 If you saw the KTRK/ABC13 story on June 17, 2026, you met two elderly Galveston brothers — Eugene Thomas, 74, and Lawrence Thomas, 73 — who sat down with a local reporter and described the moment, more than twenty years ago, when genealogical research confirmed what their family had carried in its bones for generations. They are direct descendants of John Fluker Thomas, an enslaved youth who was brought to Texas from Macon, Georgia, in the late 1830s by Rebecca Bass Menard, the fourth wife of Michel B. Menard — the man who founded the City of Galveston. John Fluker Thomas was standing in the street on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger's troops read General Order No. 3 and the more than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas learned they were free. After that day, John Fluker Thomas took the surname Thomas and dropped the surnames of the people who had owned him. He built a family. That family built a city. Two of his great-great-grandsons helped make June 19 a Texas state holiday in 1979, and one of them —…