In a flare-up of the controversy that followed a June mass shooting in South Carolina, hundreds of protesters waving Confederate flags gathered this weekend in Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park.

The park is home to the huge Confederate Memorial Carving, a southern Mount Rushmore that features Confederate president Jefferson Davis, General Robert E Lee and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

An uncomfortable tolerance of the Confederate flag in mainstream society was upended in June when photos circulated on the internet revealing that Dylann Roof, a young white racist who is charged with killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, had posed with the Confederate symbol. Roof also burned a US flag.

Hundreds of pro-Confederate flag and gun supporters rally at Stone Mountain Park. Photograph: Curtis Compton/REX Shutterstock

Many Americans assumed the Confederate flag was retired for good after governors in South Carolina and Alabama removed it from their statehouses following the Charleston shooting, and presidential candidates from both parties declared it too divisive for official display.



But John Russell Houser – who shot 11 people, two fatally, before killing himself in a Louisiana movie theater in July – flew a large Confederate flag outside his home, and hung a Nazi swastika banner outside a bar he owned in Georgia.

Many people still fly the Confederate banner, and not just in the south. Some who display it are motivated by pride in their ancestry or enthusiasm for southern history. Others see it as a symbol of their right to challenge to authority in general, and the federal government in particular. And some have hoisted Confederate flags in recent weeks precisely because the flag is generating controversy again.

Counter-protester Aurielle Marie speaks to participants during the Confederate flag rally in Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park. Photograph: Steve Eberhardt/Demotix/Corbis

“You can’t take it out on the flag – the flag had nothing to do with it,” said Ralph Chronister, who felt inspired to dig out his old Confederate flag, which is decorated with a bald eagle, and hang it from his weather-beaten front porch on a heavily travelled street in Hanover, Pennsylvania.

“I’ve got nothing against black people; I’ve got nothing against anyone else,” said Chronister, 46, who was raised in Maryland. “I’m just very proud of my southern heritage. That’s why I fly it.”

Many politicians echoed South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, in calls to remove the Confederate flag after the Charleston killings, describing it as a relic that belongs in museums but not on official display. Haley called it “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past”. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said “it shouldn’t fly anywhere”.

But the flags aren’t hard to find in places like Hanover, Pennsylvania, a factory and farm community about six miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line that saw action during the civil war’s Gettysburg campaign.

One flies from a pole on the main road into town, by a National Rifle Association banner. Another was hung from a second-floor apartment, directly above a daycare downstairs.

A protester burns a Confederate flag and taunts hundreds of Confederate flag supporters with it from outside a fence during the rally. Photograph: Curtis Compton/Zuma Press/Corbis

Jeremy Gouge, a 44-year-old roofer, said family ties to the south were why he proudly flies a Confederate battle flag on a pole in his front yard, on a quiet residential street not far from Chronister’s home.

“I know there’s things that happened to slaves and things. I can’t control what other people have done,” Gouge said. “What’s the next flag that someone is going to say: ‘We don’t like that flag – let’s take that one down?’”

It’s hardly the only place where Confederate flags fly in northern states. Hannah Alberstadt said she was surprised to see many of them in her hometown of Girard in northwestern Pennsylvania.

“My town has always had sort of a hick-ish contingent, but it’s like every other day I see another Confederate flag, and it’s just shocking,” she said. “These people are definitely trying to make a statement, because people have them waving from their truck beds, people have them on a stick in their front yards, people are wearing them to the grocery store.”

The symbol still raises ire: a flag on the back of a pickup truck parked in a convenience store lot in the middle of Hanover was set on fire. And in Elk Grove, California, a Confederate flag was displayed at a gun shop until the owners removed it in late June after getting death threats.

But Georgia’s rally wasn’t the only protest to support the flag.

An armed member of the Georgia security force militia is seen at the rally in Stone Mountain Park. Photograph: Steve Eberhardt/Demotix/Corbis

In eastern Michigan, flag supporters staged a rolling rally, with more than 50 vehicles participating. And in Florida, an estimated 2,000 vehicles adorned with the Confederate battle flag rallied outside a government complex in Ocala, with many demonstrators sporting shirts with phrases like “heritage not hate”.

In Las Vegas, Republican state assemblywoman Michelle Fiore sent out a campaign email comparing South Carolina’s removal of the flag to avoiding discussion of concentration camps and genocide. People can’t “pick and choose what parts of our history you want to remember,”, Fiore said.

On Thursday, surveillance cameras recorded two white men leaving Confederate battle flags on the grounds of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr began his campaign for racial justice a half-century ago. The Rev Raphael Warnock called it a “hateful act” and an “effort to intimidate us in some way”.

The condemnations have been good for the business of Robert Hayes, who runs the Southern Patriot Shop in Abbeville, South Carolina.

A sign outside his shop warned customers he had sold out of Confederate flags and may be out for a month or more. Hayes figures he sold about 400 after the Charleston shooting, instead of the two dozen or so he typically sells. And the purchasers seem different to him now.

A protester faces off with hundreds of pro-Confederate flag supporters during a flag rally. Photograph: Curtis Compton/ZUMA Press/Corbis

Teens are buying it as a rebellious counterculture statement against political correctness, Hayes said, and others talk of taking a stand against big government and holding fast to what they hold dear.

Carson Kimsey, 23, came to Hayes’ shop hoping for a flag to fly outside his Elbert County, Georgia, home. Kimsey gave a few different answers about the Confederate flag license plate on his pickup truck, then looked down for a second when asked if he ever thinks about how black people feel when they see it.

“If they want to get offended, that’s their problem. I fly it for my own reasons. It’s got nothing to do with hate for anybody. My boss is black. I work for two black guys. I have this tag, I pull up for work every day. It doesn’t bother them,” Kimsey said, though he acknowledged he has never broached the topic with them.

The Confederate flag still flies outside two biker bars near the home that Angela Burns, a black woman, rents on Dixie Drive in Anderson County, South Carolina, where five of the six state representatives voted against removing it from the statehouse.

Burns, 54, shrugs off the rebel banners that have sprouted up since then.

“You ignore it after a while. I’m not letting them bother me,” she said. “But every one of them knows they are being mean and ugly.”