The calm streets of Claremont filled with a different kind of energy this past Saturday. What began as a national call to reject authoritarianism found its own pulse here, among students, professors, longtime residents, and neighbors from surrounding cities.
Claremonters showed up not with anger but with wit, a peaceful rebellion rendered in cardboard, paint, ink, and marker. The air was calm, the day impossibly clear, but something electric moved through it, an intelligence, a rhythm. The signs were sharp, funny, precise. Each one landed like a line from a book you wish you had written.
There was laughter between the chants, not the laughter of mockery, but of recognition. You could feel people connecting through humor, through fatigue, through the strange joy of finally saying what everyone already knows.
Claremont, often referred to as “Squaremont” or “Clareville,” being defined by its manners and memory, showed another face that afternoon, unafraid to speak, to joke, to challenge the tone of power itself, finally. The photos tell that story, intellect meeting conscience on a sunny boulevard, a protest that sounded like thought made visible.
Take a stand, Claremont, you’ve earned a couple of protest stripes.
Julian Lucas is a photographer, writer and provocateur committed to documenting what power tries to hide. Julian is the founder of The Pomonan and founder and owner of Mirrored Society, a bookshop dedicated to fine art books. His work, on the page, in the darkroom, and in the streets, documents what institutions try to forget. He publishes what others try to bury.
