13 Black Women Share How They Found the Strength to Survive—and Thrive—With Breast Cancer

When it comes to Black women’s breast health, the statistics rarely tell a hopeful story. Black women are diagnosed with breast cancer at a younger median age (60, compared with 62 for white women) and are 38% more likely to die from the disease. They have the lowest survival rate for every known stage of breast cancer. And about one in five Black women with breast cancer are diagnosed with hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), more than any other racial or ethnic group.

But here’s what the numbers will never capture: the phone calls at 3 a.m., the head-shaving parties, the therapy sessions that cracked something open, the moment a woman looks at her daughter or granddaughter and decides they are reason enough to fight. Black women have always been more than a data point, and perhaps nowhere is that truer than in the way they face, survive, and remake their lives after a breast cancer diagnosis.

The stories below belong to 13 Black women who refused to be reduced to a statistic. They are individuals with careers, children, humor, faith, rage, and joy whose experiences with breast cancer changed them in ways both devastating and profound. In finding their own paths through treatment and beyond, they’ve built something the data can’t quantify: community, purpose, and a hard-won blueprint for survival they’re passing on to every woman who comes after them.

1. “I put my boxing gloves on and fought with everything I had.”

Monique Bass, 53, had always been proactive about her health. A single mother of twin sons and grandmother of four, she started getting annual mammograms at 40. But it was a self-exam at 47 while lying in bed one night that changed everything. She found a lump that didn’t feel right.

What followed were three tissue biopsies of the lump over three years, each coming back benign. Doctors wanted to keep monitoring. Bass pushed back. The lump was growing, and she knew her body well enough to realize something was wrong. She insisted they remove the lump (a procedure called a lumpectomy) and test it. The diagnosis: stage 1 invasive ductal carcinoma that was aggressive enough to require immediate chemotherapy.

Bass got the call while sitting in a car wash. “I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone,” she says. “Not in a million years did I think I would ever hear the words, ‘You have cancer.’” The timing made everything harder. It was 2020, the height of the pandemic, so she navigated much of her journey alone. Adding “another emotional layer,” she was also going through a divorce. Treatment included four rounds of doxorubicin, four rounds of paclitaxel, and 21 radiation treatments. Losing her hair hit the hardest. “But the silver lining is that it grew back even more beautifully after treatment,” Bass says.

Throughout it all her faith anchored her. “I’m not a deeply religious person, but I believe in God, and I knew he had me in the palm of his hand,” Bass says. On the other side of treatment, she founded What’s Behind the Bra?, a New Jersey nonprofit that distributes comfort care packages to breast cancer patients year-round and hosts a weekly podcast of the same name every Sunday at 7:30 p.m. ET.

2. “I surrounded myself with love and laughter.”

Jaqueline Beale, 64, comes from a family with a long history of cancer, including her mother, who had breast cancer. That’s why it wasn’t a huge surprise when, at 40, she found a lump during a breast self-exam. Even though a sonogram and mammogram came back clear, it was obvious that something wasn’t right, so Beale got a biopsy.

When the radiologist called with her result—stage 1 breast cancer, which means the cancer hadn’t spread beyond where the abnormal cells had developed—she could hear a lot of noise in the background. He said, “I’m in New York trying to hail a cab, but you have breast cancer. You need to find a breast surgeon.” Despite the bluntness, Beale says she couldn’t help but find the humor in the situation, which is something she carried with her through treatment.

“I made sure that I surrounded myself with laughter and love,” she says, “and I told my family that I knew they loved me, but I also needed a lot of laughter to get through it.”

She recalls one incident in an elevator after her sister had taken her to a chemo treatment. “I had been sick as a dog after, and a woman got in and asked if I was okay. My sister said, ‘Oh, she’s fine. She’s just got a little bit of cancer.’ The woman looked horrified, but I laughed. My family knew that their sense of humor is what I needed.”

3. “What once felt like the end became the beginning of something greater.”

Annita White, 51, was five months late for her mammogram. As a single mother of two boys, a higher education administrator, and a first-year PhD student, she always had something more pressing. When she finally went, she expected the usual letter in the mail saying everything was fine. Instead, she got a call. There was a mass that hadn’t been there before.

By the time the biopsy came back, she already knew. A technician had commented on how hard the mass was, and White felt the diagnosis in her spirit before the words were ever spoken. The confirmation came the next day. “When I got the call, I fell to the floor and cried tears of desperation,” she says. “My first thought was, ‘Lord, I can’t do this.’”

What followed was hard in every way: chemotherapy, losing her breasts, losing her hair, which had always been full. “Being bald left me feeling vulnerable and insecure,” White says. “Physically, losing my breasts and going through chemotherapy made me feel like my body was no longer my own.” Through it all the fear that drove her was running out of time—time to see her sons become men and to meet her grandchildren someday.

Her faith, which she’d been privately wrestling with for years, met her exactly where she was. She’d been asking God to truly show up in her life. “He did,” she says. “In the middle of one of the hardest seasons of my life, he carried me through.”

Three years later White is cancer-free, her hair is back, and she recently finished her PhD. She now walks in her purpose as Dr. Nita, a member of the African American Breast Cancer Alliance survivor network, sharing her story and those of others facing the disease. “What once felt like the end became the beginning of something greater,” she says.

4. “The clouds are moving. The sun has decided to show itself.”

Marylande Regis, 38, had been in her new Georgia home for four months when everything changed. A registered nurse, realtor, wife, and mother of three, she had just stopped breastfeeding her nine-month-old when she found the lump. Her baby had never latched well on that side. When she messaged her provider, the on-call response was that it was probably a clogged milk duct and that she was too young to worry about it being something more serious. Regis didn’t accept that. She called back and left a message, insisting that something was wrong. “Another ob-gyn saw the message and encouraged me to make an office appointment immediately,” she says. Within two weeks she had a diagnosis: aggressive stage 2B, BRCA1-positive breast cancer. Within two more weeks what had been one tumor and one impacted lymph node had become three tumors and four impacted lymph nodes. Regis was 36.

“I was relieved that I advocated for myself,” she says. “I was proud that fear didn’t factor into my decision.”

What followed was relentless. Regis went through six months of chemotherapy, a bilateral mastectomy, six weeks of radiation, a total hysterectomy (to eliminate her body’s main source of estrogen), and breast reconstruction, all over a span of roughly 18 months. She lost friends to cancer along the way, as well as a cousin diagnosed around the same time. Her faith was, as Regis describes it, “shaken and stirred and flipped every way possible.” She wrote the important letters. She wrote her own obituary. She was practical about it. “I wanted to be positive, but I am also very realistic,” Regis says.

The hardest part wasn’t any single treatment—it was losing control. As her family’s go-to planner for everything from doctor’s appointments to vacations, she found it foreign to ask for help. But when she told her parents, her mother showed up and never left. “We joke, but my mom never went home,” Regis says. “This is her house now.” Her husband, Kory, came to every appointment and held steady even through both of them losing their jobs. “He deserves a trophy,” she says.

As the daughter of Haitian immigrants, raised to be everything her parents couldn’t be, Regis says the fight was never just medical. Today strength looks different than it did before cancer. It looks like making it to the bus stop with her son, who has autism. It looks like seeing her oldest finish nursing school and work toward becoming an ob-gyn. It looks like watching her youngest hit milestones like learning to talk. “I would have missed that if I didn’t fight,” she says. “The clouds are moving. The sun has decided to show itself. I can’t wait to soak it all in.”

5. “Sickness had never been my world.”

Illness had always been an afterthought for 75-year-old Judy Fambrough-Billingsley. Why would it cross her mind? She walked three miles every day, swam laps all summer, took Zumba classes, and played soccer for 30 years. Judy Fambrough-Billingsley had never smoked or drank, and she didn’t even need to take medication. Being healthy wasn’t something she worked at; it was just who she was. A naturalized American citizen born in Germany, she traveled back to her home country regularly to visit family. Her life was full and active.

So when she felt a lump—and then another six months later—she ignored them. After all, she’d had a clean mammogram earlier that year. But when she noticed them growing and multiplying, she went back to her doctor. The results were not what she expected.

“I was shocked,” Fambrough-Billingsley says. She suddenly found herself navigating an entirely new set of experiences: prescription bottles, hospital procedures, lab processes—the whole medical system. “Being a part of a world where sickness exists had never been my world until now,” she says.

What carried her through was far older than her diagnosis. She grew up during the Civil Rights Era, the daughter of a successful Black entrepreneur who built his business during tumultuous years in US history. Both her parents were lifetime members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was president of the NAACP Youth Council and an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Fambrough-Billingsley knows something about fighting for your life in systems that weren’t built for you.

“Growing up during the Civil Rights Era contributed to this era of fighting,” she says. “Never giving up.” That same spirit—the one her parents modeled, the one she fell into during her work as a community organizer and across decades of a life fully lived—is the one she’s bringing to this too. She may still be on her breast cancer journey, but this is not her first fight.

6. “I was so used to always being the strong one.”

Taylor Johnson was nearly 30 when she found the lump on her left breast. A mom and content creator who loves trying new things and staying active, she went to her primary care doctor, who referred her for an ultrasound and a mammogram. Johnson was denied a mammogram—she was told she was too young. She pushed anyway, got a biopsy (in lieu of the mammogram), and days later, had a diagnosis: stage 2 triple-negative breast cancer.

“My reaction was a very deep pause, trying to process what my doctor had told me,” Johnson says. “It then hit me, and all I could do was cry.”

She’s in the middle of her treatment plan, which includes six months of chemotherapy, followed by surgery and three weeks of radiation. After finishing chemo Johnson felt confident that would be the hardest part of her journey, both physically and emotionally. But her own health wasn’t her only concern: She knew her five-year-old was watching her every move, and she wanted to stay stable for her daughter. “I was so used to always being the strong one,” Johnson says. “This definitely tested that.” She held it together not because it came easily, but because she understood what her daughter was absorbing.

She is grateful for the community that rallied around her while she waited. Weekly prayer calls, rotating visits from family and friends, and a medical team at Mayo Clinic in Arizona that went above and beyond carried her through.

Though Johnson hasn’t finished treatment yet, completing chemo clarified something for her. “It has reassured me how strong I truly am,” she says. Strength, she’s learned, isn’t just physical. The emotional and mental muscle it takes to keep going counts just as much.

7. “I wanted to feel supported through it, not just survive it.”

Jessica Ncube, 41, built her life around caring for others. A licensed clinical social worker, the co-owner of a mental health practice, and a mom, she was always in motion. Her life revolved around showing up for others and helping them navigate their hardest moments. “Looking back I do not know that I was always receiving,” she says.

Her diagnosis came quietly. A routine mammogram caught it; nothing in her body had felt amiss. That silence, Ncube says, is exactly why early detection matters. When she got the news she went into survival mode. “You hear the words, but it takes time for them to land,” she says.

Ncube’s journey started with a lumpectomy. When her margins came back unclear, meaning the pathologist could not determine whether all the cancerous cells were removed, she made the decision to move forward with a double mastectomy with reconstructive surgery. “Losing a part of your body, even when it is lifesaving, is still a loss,” she says. “The hardest part was learning how to sit in both gratitude and grief at the same time.”

As someone professionally wired to be strong for others, letting that tendency go was its own kind of work. “Strength became less about holding everything in and more about being honest about what I needed,” Ncube says. Her faith grounded her, and her community showed up, but she also had to unlearn something deeply familiar. “As a Black woman there is a resilience that is almost ingrained in us,” she says. “I had to learn how to balance that resilience with softness.”

After completing treatment Ncube has become more present and deliberate. Her definition of strength has changed entirely. “Strength today is softness. It is honesty. It is allowing myself to receive, to rest, and to not have all the answers,” she says.

8. “Cancer doesn’t define you. You define you.”

Ameiko Newman, 40, didn’t learn of her diagnosis through a routine screening. She was rushed to the hospital for abdominal pain, and that’s when she learned she had breast cancer. Life before her diagnosis had been stressful, uncertain, a season of not quite knowing where she was headed. In a strange way, cancer gave her direction.

“For me, cancer saved me,” she says. “It made me a better person. It made me fight harder, push through the hard times and know what I want in life.”

Newman is still in treatment, receiving chemotherapy and immunotherapy every week, and she is honest about what that looks like: There are good days and bad days. She goes to church faithfully, prays every day, and tries to stay positive through it all.

What has surprised her most is that in the middle of fighting for her own life, she found her purpose: helping others fight for theirs. Newman rebranded her business entirely around that mission and started designing scarves with chemo patients in mind. “I started making them mainly for my Black women because you know we love having style,” she says. But a wide variety of women from all over have since bought them.

She wakes up every day, gets her kids ready, works out, and moves through life. Faith, she says, is what makes that possible. Her message to any Black woman who’s just gotten diagnosed is both simple and hard-won: “Cancer doesn’t define you. You define you. Even though you’re fighting for your life, help someone else fight for theirs.”

9. “I shifted to being overly optimistic.”

Charlotte Connor, 38, had just undergone a breast augmentation when she felt a lump in her breast. “When I saw my doctor, they weren’t concerned, in part because of my young age,” says Connor, who was 30 years old at the time. She had a mammogram and ultrasound to check for signs of cancer, but no MRI. “Looking back now I wish I would have asked for that MRI,” she says.

At the first checkup six months later, they told her she was fine. At the second—one year after the original lump was found—the lump had tripled in size. Her doctor ordered a biopsy, and her diagnosis was confirmed: stage 2A ductal carcinoma, which means the cancer was growing but contained to the breast and surrounding lymph nodes.

“When they told me I had cancer, I was calm,” she says. Her mindset immediately shifted from a sinking feeling to being optimistic about the future. “I focused on getting healthy again,” says Connor, who started fantasizing about what she would do after treatment.

She remembers thinking, I may be feeling sick and throwing up from chemotherapy, but what restaurants am I going to go to after all this is over? It’s an outlook that didn’t necessarily come naturally to her, either. “I’m not even overly optimistic in life—I think I’m a realist—but in this situation, I shifted to being overly optimistic.”

Part of that mindset shift was for her young daughter. “I couldn’t be pessimistic; I had to be strong for her,” she says. “And I knew that how I acted in this situation was how she was going to mirror things and react to stressful situations when she got older.”

Connor’s other pillar of support came from a tight-knit circle of friends and family, who threw her a head-shaving party before she lost her hair due to chemo. “Making things fun and lighthearted like that got me through my darkest, saddest moments,” she says.

10. “We have been through challenges our whole lives. This is just one more.”

It was 1999, and Donna Culmer had just received a clean mammogram. A few months later she felt a stone-size bump on her right side, so she went back to her ob-gyn to get it checked out. They redid the mammogram on both breasts, and while what she’d felt was actually a fibrocystic lump, the imaging found a small, not palpable spot on her left side that turned out to be a stage 1 cancer. “I was stunned,” Culmer says. “I didn’t even know what questions to ask.” She drove back to work in a daze and told her boss what had happened.

At 46 she was serving in the Navy as an instructor and trainer to personnel who were working alongside the Marines. She was married to a Marine and raising three children. There was no good moment for this. There never is.

Four months of chemotherapy followed, with nausea and exhaustion that never quite let up. Her doctors were concerned that the chemo might not work, so she had a mastectomy. Through it all her community refused to let her go through it alone. Her father drove her to every session and sat with her. Her church came to her, literally; services were held at her house.

Twenty-seven years later, Culmer, now 73, has had time to reflect. “As Black women, we have been through challenges our whole lives,” she says. “This is just one more.” Her advice is practical and clear. “Don’t panic and ask questions, even if you have to write them down,” Culmer says. “The treatments available now are so much better than what I had.”

11. “Therapy fortified me to get through cancer.”

One morning, Patricia Fox, 38, woke up with a lump in her right breast that wasn’t there the night before—she was just 26 years old at the time. Fox scheduled an appointment with her ob-gyn that day. “They told me that I was a young Black woman and had dense breasts, and it was likely a cyst,” she says. “They were ready to turn me away.”

The lump, which was a little smaller than a golf ball, seemed strange to Fox. Thankfully, she listened to her intuition. “There was something telling me to get it checked out,” she says, so her doctor did a biopsy just to be sure.

Her results came back as estrogen receptor-positive stage 2A breast cancer, meaning her cancer had estrogen receptors that would respond to hormone therapy drugs. Fox says she’ll never forget her doctor’s words: “Patricia, you’ll be a breast cancer survivor.” That sentiment set the tone for her mindset as a fighter. “It made me think that I could face this and survive this,” she says.

Still, cancer treatments quickly overwhelmed Fox, and soon she faced her lowest point: crying on the floor for hours, feeling like having cancer at such a young age was a punishment for being a “bad person.” But she pulled herself out of it with hard work in therapy.

“I found that talking to a therapist helped me process my diagnosis and examine the areas of my life—certain people and my own behavior patterns—that were cancerous for me that I needed to do something about,” she says. “While therapy didn’t make the pain go away, it did make how I coped with it much better.”

In the Black community, therapy is often taboo, says Fox, but it’s become her mission to dispel that belief. “Therapy fortified me to get through cancer,” she says, “and I tell everyone that they don’t have to suffer in silence.”

12. “I turned to prayer to remain calm.”

Annette Colden, 63, was sitting at her sister’s bedside during the last days of her final battle with breast cancer when the conversation turned to screenings. Her sister had been through cervical cancer and two bouts of breast cancer before passing away from the disease. “She made me promise I’d get my mammograms,” Colden says.

Colden’s first two yearly mammograms were clear. On the third there was a spot, but she was told by her doctor that things looked okay and it wasn’t cancer—she just had lumpy breasts.

“There’s this inner feeling you have,” she says. “Something was inside me saying, That’s not right.” Her sister’s doctor had told her the exact same thing, but Colden was so happy to hear she didn’t have cancer that she didn’t follow up.

A year later she went back for a mammogram, and that’s when her doctors found it: stage 0 breast cancer, meaning only abnormal cells had been found. She was 42. “Now, looking back, I always tell women that if something doesn’t feel right, get a second opinion.”

Despite the diagnosis Colden remained calm. “I’m a religious person,” she says. “In my prayer I said, ‘Lord, if you will be my pilot on this journey, I’ll be your copilot.’” She immediately felt a sense of peace.

After her recovery she decided to share that calming presence with other women going through breast cancer at a support group through Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she had treatment. “I say, ‘It’s going to be a long road. If you don’t want to travel it alone, I’m right there with you.’”

And she means it. Sometimes that involves talking with someone at 3 a.m. when the pain from chemotherapy hits. Other times it means sending food delivery boxes to the homes of people with breast cancer who can’t muster the strength to leave. “My sister did a lot of support work before she got really sick,” she says. “This is her vision.”

13. “I quit my life and started a new one as an advocate.”

Ricki Fairley, 69, was in the security line at the airport for a work trip when she got a call from her doctor. They’d found a peanut-like lump under her nipple that turned out to be cancer.

Fairley, who was 55 at the time, said, “I don’t have time for this right now. I’ll call you when I get to my destination.” A couple days later she found out she had stage 3A TNBC, and it was really aggressive. Compared with other breast cancers, TNBC has fewer targeted-therapy treatment options, often spreads beyond the breasts, and is more likely to recur. Black women have nearly three times the risk of developing triple-negative breast cancer.

Her diagnosis woke her up. “It made me realize that I needed to get all of the ‘cancers’ out of my life,” Fairley says. During treatment that first year which involved a double mastectomy, aggressive chemotherapy, and radiation, she quit her job and started her own company. Then she filed for divorce and later sold her house. “I quit my life and started a new one, and changed everything,” she says. “I had to learn that my peace is nonnegotiable. I really think that stress caused my breast cancer.”

A year later her life changed again. Fairley was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and told she had two years to live. After finding out her current doctor had only treated two previous cases of TNBC and both women had died in eight months, she found a new doctor, who was well-versed in current research and treatments for the disease. She beat cancer a second time. “I remember sitting at my daughter’s graduation thinking, Okay, I made it. What’s next for me?” Fairley says. The answer: helping others. In the years that followed, Fairley cofounded The Black Breast Cancer Alliance, which works to reduce the mortality rate for Black women.