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Harriet Hancock, a pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights organizations in South Carolina who helped organize the state’s first Pride March more than 35 years ago, died Wednesday just days short of her 90th birthday.
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Known as “Mama Harriet” for her role supporting many members of the queer community in Columbia and beyond, Hancock was the founder of the community center that bears her name, South Carolina’s first chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services.
“We can’t sum up the ways that Harriet Hancock made a difference in South Carolina in just one post or one email,” the Harriet Hancock Center said in an Instagram post. “Harriet lived long enough to see a South Carolina that changed in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when she first began this work. She also knew that the work was unfinished… Harriet Daniels Hancock changed South Carolina.”
Matt Butler, who now serves as board president of the Hancock Center, remembered Hancock as a loving presence for younger people like him when he first started working at the center, which provides support and educational programs for the local community.
“I came to her when I had questions and concerns with the relationship with my own family, and she was always so loving and caring and willing to be that for so many people,” Butler said. “In a way [Mama Harriet] is an honorific of what she did to start the Pride movement, to start so many wonderful organizations that benefit the community, and she loved and cared for all of us.
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“Even when she retired, she still stayed involved and was willing and wanted to do whatever she could to help,” he said.
Dylan Gunnels, president of S.C. Pride, said the organization started when Hancock, holding her son’s hand, joined the march up Columbia’s Main Street for the state’s first ever Pride March.
“All of us at S.C. Pride wouldn’t be where we are today without her and the first steps she took with her son,” Gunnels said. “S.C. Pride is an organization here 37 years later, and we’ve been all volunteer since she started walking around Finlay Park with a clipboard, but there are now 10-plus prides in cities and towns across the state.”
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