Harriet Hancock

Harriet Daniels Hancock was an American activist and lawyer who became the central figure of South Carolina's LGBTQ rights movement for more than four decades. Known widely as the Mother of SC Pride, she founded the first southeastern chapter of PFLAG, cofounded Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services, helped organize the state's first Pride march, and established the community center that now bears her name. She died in Columbia, South Carolina, in September 2026 at the age of 89, days before her 90th birthday. The Harriet Hancock Center announced her death on the evening of 23 September 2026; WIS News 10 reported the news the same night. English-language coverage did not publish a separate hour-by-hour medical timeline, so 23 September 2026 is the best-confirmed date associated with her death and the center's announcement.

Hancock was born Harriet Daniels on 25 September 1936 in Columbia to Elizabeth and Harry Daniels, one of four children in a working-class family. She graduated from Columbia High School in 1954, married at 18, and raised three children while living in New Jersey, Florida, Washington, D.C., and Maryland as her husband's work moved the family. In 1978 she returned to Columbia after separating from her husband, who died the following year from alcoholism. She enrolled at the University of South Carolina, earning a sociology degree and later a law degree, studying alongside her son Greg.

Her public activism began after Greg came out to her as gay around 1980-81. She founded Columbia's PFLAG chapter in 1982, the first in the Southeast, and became a visible advocate for parents and LGBTQ people in a climate that was often hostile. In 1985 she cofounded Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services (PALSS) and personally visited hospitalized men with HIV when many families would not. Her legal work shifted toward pro bono representation of gay men, including people living with HIV; the South Carolina Bar later named her Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year (1991), and the Human Rights Campaign gave her its Equality Award in 1997.

In 1990 she helped lead South Carolina's first Pride march, guiding roughly 2,000 people down Columbia's Main Street to the State House. In 1994 a building on Woodrow Street became a volunteer-run LGBTQ community space; it was renamed the Harriet Hancock Center in 2005 and remains the state's first LGBTQ resource center serving all ages. In later years she focused increasingly on transgender advocacy across the South. After her death the center wrote that she had lived to see a South Carolina changed in ways hard to imagine when she began, and that she knew the work was unfinished.