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

But people still fly it, and not just in the South, despite announcements by leading flag-makers and retailers that they will no longer sell products showing the secessionist battle flag.

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 it's generating controversy again.

"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 traveled street in Hanover, Penn.

"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."

An uncomfortable tolerance of the Confederate flag in mainstream society was upended in June when photos circulated on the Internet revealing that a young white racist charged with killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C, had posed with the Confederate symbol. Dylann Roof also burned a U.S. flag for good measure. Roof wants to plead guilty to more than 30 federal charges, his lawyer said Friday.

John Russell Houser - the right-wing extremist who shot 11 people, two of them fatally, before killing himself in a Louisiana movie theater in July - also flew a large Confederate flag outside his home, and hung a Nazi swastika banner outside a bar he owned in Georgia.

Many politicians echoed South Carolina's Republican Gov. Nikki Haley 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."

Hundreds of Confederate flag wavers gathered this weekend in Georgia's Stone Mountain Park, home to the huge "Confederate Memorial Carving" featuring Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

But the flags aren't hard to find in places like Hanover, 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 day-care downstairs.

Jeremy Gouge, a 44-year-old roofer, said family ties to the South are 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.