In June 1990, Harriet Hancock walked at the front of a line of more than 2,000 people moving down Main Street in Columbia, South Carolina, her son Greg at her side, on the way to the State House for the state's first Pride march. Hancock, the Columbia attorney who spent more than four decades building South Carolina's LGBTQ+ support network largely by hand, died on September 23, 2026, at 89, days before her 90th birthday.

Hancock was born on September 25, 1936, in Columbia. She married after her husband graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1959 with an engineering degree earned through the GI Bill following his service in the Korean War, and the couple moved to New Jersey, where he worked for RCA and later for the federal government. After his death, Hancock returned to South Carolina in 1978 with her three children and worked as a hairstylist.

Her son Greg came out to her around 1980, when he was a teenager. "Mom, I'm gay," he told her, and she answered, as she recalled decades later to QnotesCarolinas, "Is that what this is all about? I thought maybe you got caught smoking pot or you got arrested." She told him it was okay and that she loved him. Working out what to do next, she heard a public radio program about a New York woman named Amy Ashworth who belonged to a group called Parents of Gays, later renamed Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. In 1982, Hancock started the Columbia chapter herself, one of the first PFLAG chapters in the South.

In 1985, the same month she started law school at the University of South Carolina, Hancock helped establish Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services, which grew into the Midlands region's main AIDS service organization. While in school she volunteered as a "buddy" to people living with HIV and AIDS, sitting with men who had lost jobs, insurance, and often their own families. She earned her law degree in 1988, becoming a lawyer at 51 after an earlier career as a hairstylist, and began offering free legal representation and estate planning to LGBTQ+ clients. That work was recognized in 1991, when the South Carolina Bar named her its Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year, Harriet Hancock Center Board President Matt Buttler said in a statement carried by the Post and Courier.

"In 1989, she helped gather the organizers who would plan South Carolina's first Pride March," Buttler said. After months of work, more than 2,000 people gathered in Columbia in June 1990 and marched from Main Street to the State House, with Hancock walking at the front beside Greg. The march earned her the title she carried the rest of her life, the Mother of South Carolina Pride, or simply Mama Harriet.

Through the 1990s, Hancock pressed the city of Columbia to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination employment policy, working with the Greater Columbia Community Relations Council to help shape both that policy and the city's Human Rights Ordinance. She was also part of the effort that founded a Columbia resource center in 1993, the first LGBTQ+ community center in the Southeast, which bought its longtime home on Woodrow Street the following year. In 1997, the Human Rights Campaign gave her its Equality Award, and from 1997 to 2000 she served on the board of the South Carolina Progressive Network.

The University of South Carolina's library later recorded Hancock for separate oral history projects on the state's LGBTQ history and on the second wave of the women's movement, preserving her account of those decades in her own words. Hancock's daughter, Jennifer Tague, also took part in a StoryCorps conversation about those early years that South Carolina Public Radio featured in 2025. In it, Hancock remembered parents showing up at her first PFLAG meetings asking how she had come to accept Greg and how they might bring their own parents around. "They were looking to me for some answers," she said, "and I really didn't have any."

The Columbia center where much of that work took root was later renamed the Harriet Hancock Center in her honor. "As she came to know other LGBTQ+ young people whose families had rejected or struggled to understand them, she realized how desperately South Carolina needed places of acceptance, support and belonging. So Harriet began building them," the Harriet Hancock Center said in a statement carried by the Post and Courier announcing her death. Of the center's naming, Hancock had said simply, "It's my community, it's my family. I'm proud the center is named after me."

The PFLAG chapter Hancock started with a handful of frightened parents in 1982 is still meeting in South Carolina today. The AIDS service organization she helped found continues its work across the Midlands. The center on Woodrow Street that now carries her name still runs the youth group, book club, and senior gatherings she wanted a scared teenager and his mother to have had somewhere to find, on the same Columbia streets she once marched with Greg beside her.