On a pavement across the street from the Supreme Court, school teacher Amanda Stafford chalked the words carefully: “That’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.”

It was a quotation from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice more renowned for her dissents than her majority opinions. As summer succumbed to the chill of autumn, thousands came to mourn her at a vigil outside the court in Washington.

“I wanted to show words that are empowering at a time when a lot of people are feeling worn out,” explained the 31-year- old woman from Virginia. “As a woman in a country getting ever more divided, it’s important to come out and make a stand for someone who made this her life’s work…. I called my closest girlfriends and we cried together. What is the state of American democracy that one single woman passing away feels like a harbinger of hopelessness?”