Susan Bro’s daughter was killed while protesting against a far-right rally in Virginia. She has set up a foundation in her memory to fight for social justice, and explains why it has helped cope with her grief

Susan Bro jokes that she gives hugs for a living. Often, a stranger will approach her on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, and ask her if she is Heather Heyer’s mother. Then they ask for a hug. She’s fine with that, but she won’t accept charity. For a while, she and her husband couldn’t go to a restaurant without a well-wisher offering to pick up the bill.

“Why am I getting a present because my daughter died?” she asks from the office of the fledgling Heather Heyer Foundation. “That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m uncomfortable with people trying to hero-worship Heather or me. We’re just normal people who happen to run our mouths. It’s just that other people are listening now – that’s the difference.”

On 12 August, Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal with a passion for social justice, joined a protest against the far-right rally Unite the Right when a man called James Fields ploughed his car into the crowd she was in. Bro received a call from one of Heyer’s friends saying that her daughter had been hit. By the time Bro reached the hospital, Heyer was dead. Four days later, Bro’s eloquent speech at the memorial service went round the world: “They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well, guess what? You just magnified her.”

Bro knew there would be media attention, but had “no idea how crazy it was going to get”. Until then Bro, a 61-year-old retired teacher, considered herself “a half-hippy, half-secretary, farmer-girl wannabe”. Now she spends her time running the foundation, which funds scholarships for trainee paralegals and social workers, giving interviews and speaking at high schools about social justice. She thinks it’s what Heyer would have wanted, but it is also what Bro needs. “This is how I cope with my grief, by making something out of it. What am I supposed to do? Just sit at home and cry? I have things to do and they’re going to make a difference.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susan Bro: ‘I have things to do and they’re going to make a difference.’ Photograph: Julia Rendleman/The Guardian

There are limits, though. One company asked to use Heyer’s name on a brochure “to stick it to the Trump supporters”. “That’s not our philosophy,” Bro says. “We’re seeing how to make things better, not how to start another fight.” After the president failed to condemn the neo-Nazis, saying that there were “very fine people on both sides”, Bro refused to take calls from the White House, but she won’t attack Trump. “My focus is not on changing the administration as much as changing people’s hearts,” she says. “I have to be careful because people want me to say bad things about the president. My son is in the army reserve and I don’t want a target on his back. I gave up one kid. I don’t want to give up two.”

Bro likes to grieve in private and be strong in public. She doesn’t want to be pitied or protected. Hate mail from those in the far right doesn’t shake her. “If they send me an email, I want to read it. I don’t look away from the nasties.” She has had to take some precautions, though, like interring Heyer’s ashes in a secret location so that the grave doesn’t become a target for vandalism. She has also resisted offers of an official memorial, agreeing only to have part of the street where Heyer died renamed Heather Heyer Way. “And they’ll probably try to deface that,” she says sharply.

Last week, Bro attended James Fields’ initial court hearing and plans to watch the trial. “I have to know,” she says. “That’s part of my closure. I make myself do the tough things. When we went into court, some of Heather’s friends were anxious about having to walk past the Nazi supporters and I said: ‘Put on your game face. A cold, blank stare is the best way to deal with a bully.’”

Seeing Fields convicted, however, is not enough. “He didn’t show up and run his car into a crowd because he was bored,” Bro says. “He showed up for a cause.” She compares racism in the US to the wound she received from cancer surgery seven years ago. “To get that to heal, you have to keep it open and cleaned out because the infection will fester if you don’t. And I think that’s what has happened in our country. We didn’t take into account how deeply the infection ran. Now we have to keep the wound open enough to heal it.”

Bro hates it when people say Heyer was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “That’s not true. She was in the right place at the right time and he made a bad choice and killed her.” She recently added childhood snapshots of Heyer to the foundation’s website, to remind people that her daughter was a person, not a symbol.

“We miss her laugh a lot,” she says, her voice trembling. “She could keep you in stitches, but she had some very powerful lessons to teach as well. Who Heather was to us is not entirely the same as the public sees her now. If you make her into this saintly figure, then it becomes something unattainable by ordinary people. And I have said from the beginning that now is the time for action for everybody. Normal people have to stand up and be counted.”