Where You Can Find Confederate Flag Flying in Pennsylvania

Popularity of the Confederate flag seemed to be surging in Pennsylvania in recent years, with the stars and bars displayed on buildings, poles and vehicles throughout the Northern state, The Associated Press reported. While efforts to remove the Southern relic from public display surge throughout the nation, some Pennsylvanian’s continue to defend it.

On June 17, nine African-American men and women at a Bible study in South Carolina were shot dead by a racist gunman whose image posing with the Confederate flag and other symbols of white supremacy, fueling a nationwide debate about the flag’s meaning and place in society.

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"You can't take it out on the flag — the flag had nothing to do with it," Hanover, Pennsylvania resident Ralph Chronister, who was raised in Maryland, told the AP. "I've got nothing against black people; I've got nothing against anyone else. I'm just very proud of my Southern heritage. That's why I fly it."

Others expressed shock about the pervasiveness of the Confederate symbol.

“It's like every other day I see another Confederate flag, and it's just shocking," Girard, Pennsylvania, resident Hannah Alberstadt told the AP. "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."

Eric Heyl wrote in a Trib Total Media opinion column that the popularity of the Confederate flags he saw regularly in western Pennsylvania shows “that many people perplexingly are proud to identify with the losing side – in battle and ideologically – in the nation’s ugliest-ever schism.”

Heyl added: “To me, the Confederate flag means not a celebration of Southern culture, but everything historically ugly about it: slavery, lynchings, segregation. Those who want to display it should have that right, but they should enjoy the right to be considered insensitive and prejudiced for doing so.”

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