Carolyn Bailey Lewis went to meetings for years where nobody else in the room looked like her, and she kept going.
“It was rough because I would go to meetings and nobody looked like me,” she said. “You’re sometimes dismissed as a woman and as a Black woman.”
Lewis was 78 when she died, which her daughter announced on social media. She was the first Black woman to lead a public television station in the continental United States, and she ran the WOUB Center for Public Media at Ohio University for 14 years.
She graduated from West Virginia University’s P.I. Reed School of Journalism in 1971, the first Black woman to do it. She started at WNPB-TV, the PBS station in Morgantown, West Virginia, as a writer and announcer, moved up to community relations manager and then to public information and graphic design manager, and in 1993 was named its general manager. In 1997, she came to Ohio University as director and general manager of WOUB, the first woman and the first African American to hold that job. She finished a Ph.D. in communications studies while she was running the station, and when she retired in 2011, she became the first woman named director emerita of the center.
The clearest thing she ever said about the job was about a jazz show. The numbers were against it. “Jazz programming wasn’t doing well,” she said, and she said she was told she would lose money if she kept it. She kept it, because of who was listening. “They can’t find anywhere else,” she said.
In 1995, a benign spinal cord tumour paralysed her. The surgery took 11 hours. “About every four or five years after that surgery, I would lose my mobility again,” she said. She was running a station the whole time.
She sat on the board of trustees of the Association of Public Television Stations and on the board of directors of the National Education Telecommunications Association, chaired the PBS Advertising and Promotion Advisory Committee, and served on the Athens City Commission on Disabilities and the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities. In 2024 Ohio University established the Dr. Carolyn Bailey Lewis Leadership Award at WOUB Public Media, an annual award for junior-level students who lead inclusively.
“We will deeply miss her wisdom, her kindness, and her warm smile,” said Steve Skidmore, WOUB’s interim general manager. “Her door was always open to employees and students alike, and she led by example every day.”
She knew what she was carrying. “I knew I had to get it right for those coming behind me,” she said, “and there were indeed lots coming behind me.”
