Rankin County residents packed Brandon City Hall to discuss whether a Confederate statue belongs in the town center where a bulk of local traffic flows. But most took stances on whether it represents heritage or hate.
“It’s hatred,” Janie Mclaurin-Wheaton said at the meeting Monday. “You want to leave ‘that’ history, but you want to take mine out of the school? What about my history? I was born here, too.”
Mclaurin-Wheaton, who is Black, was a member of the first graduating class to integrate Brandon High School and was referring to a new law that seeks to restrict teachers from discussing “divisive”concepts like slavery and the causes of the Civil War. Her grandfather was the first Black man in Rankin County to own land and a car. She was one of the first Black women hired in the Rankin County Tax Assessor’s office, where she worked for 27 years…