Anita Conner and her daughter Kerri Conner Matchett founded Praise Is the Cure in 2005, and both of them died of the disease it was built to fight.
Anita was a certified public accountant and financial consultant. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997 and died on August 4, 2025, after the cancer returned following about 23 years in remission. She would have turned 70 on October 14. Kerri, her daughter and business partner and a mother of two, died in December 2022 at the age of 48, after nine years in remission and about five years living with metastatic disease.
The organization they started is still running. It does education, screenings, survivor support and health resources, and Salem Baptist Church has hosted its Super Saturday for two years. “They were both unusual spokeswomen for a very pressing issue,” said the Rev. Marshall Mitchell, the church’s pastor. “They battled the disease personally and heroically.”
Dawn Roberts, a longtime volunteer, said Anita was still planning events a week before she died. “She was not just a ‘woe is me’ person,” Roberts said. “She asked herself, ‘How can I make a difference in the lives of others?'”
Breast cancer mortality is about 34 percent higher among Black women than white women in Komen’s figures for 2020 to 2024. Five year survival was 85 percent for non-Hispanic Black women and 94 percent for non-Hispanic white women in its 2016 to 2022 data.
