The mother of Heather Heyer, the woman killed by a white nationalist during the Charlottesville rally, has given a stirring speech to not let her death be wasted.
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up,” Susan Bro spouted from a large theatre stage in downtown Charlottesville. “But guess what? You just magnified her.”
“I’d rather have my child,” She continued. “But by golly, if I’ve got give her up, we’re going to make it count.”
Bro went on to urge the massive crowd to by all means be mad, but channel that “anger into righteous action”.
“I want this to spread; I don’t want this to die. This is just the beginning of Heather’s legacy. This is not the end of her legacy.”
WATCH: Donald Trump’s distressing Charlottesville press conference.
Heyer, who worked as a paralegal, was killed in a terror attack just metres from the theatre where her mum gave the moving speech – a theatre which used to have separate entrances for “coloureds” and “whites”, a reminder of the town’s racist past.
Mark Heyer, Heather’s father, barely held back tears while he thanked the crowd and said he was “overwhelmed by the rainbow of colours in this room.”
“That’s how Heather was,” he added. “It didn’t matter who you were or where you were from, if she loved you, you were stuck.”
“In our family, all lives matter. She absorbed that quite well,” her grandfather Elwood Shrader said.
The Virginia State Governor Terry McAuliffe also spoke out about the racism and bigotry on display in Charlottesville over the weekend.
“No parent should ever have to go through losing a child,” he said.
“Now is time for healing, it is time for reconciliation. We need to go forward; we need to put the hatred behind us, the bigotry.
“We need to come together, as Heather’s mother spoke about.”
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