Carolyn Bailey Lewis

Carolyn Bailey Lewis died peacefully on Wednesday 21 October 2026 at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, aged 78. Her daughter announced the death on social media, and WOUB Public Media published a tribute on 23 October. No cause of death was made public.

WOUB interim general manager Steve Skidmore, who worked with her, said she "brought an unwavering passion for public media" and that her door "was always open to employees and students alike." She was survived by her son Carey I. Bailey and his wife Nakia, her daughter Dr. Caryn M. Bailey, and her grandchildren Evann and Leah Bailey.

A celebration of life was arranged for Wednesday 28 October 2026 at 10 a.m. at Jagers and Sons Funeral Home in Athens, Ohio. The family asked for donations to the Dr. Carolyn Bailey Lewis Leadership Award at WOUB in place of flowers.

Carolyn Foster was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 19 September 1948, the only child of David Foster and Jacqueline Robinson Foster. When she was six months old her mother and grandmother fell ill, and she was raised by her great aunt, Thelma Stone, known as Mama Thelma, in Bluefield, West Virginia.

She attended segregated schools and lived in a segregated neighbourhood, and spent much of her childhood at her aunt's Hotel Thelma and Travelers Inn, both listed in the Green Book. Because Black performers on the so-called Chitlin Circuit could not stay in other hotels, guests included Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, Sam Cooke and Little Richard. She later recalled watching all of this as a child of seven, eight and nine.

At West Virginia University she studied journalism and speech and in 1971 became the first African American woman to graduate from the Perley I. Reed School of Journalism, now the Reed College of Media. She went on to earn a Master of Science in journalism there, and decades later a PhD in communication studies from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University.

Lewis began her career in 1972 at WNPB-TV, the PBS station in Morgantown, West Virginia, as a writer and announcer. She became continuity chief, community relations manager and director of public information and graphic design before being named general manager in 1993, the first Black woman to lead a full service public television station in the continental United States. She later said the role was hard at first because nobody at the meetings looked like her, and that she learned to speak up and "own the table." Under her leadership the station produced the six and a half hour documentary West Virginia: A Film History (1995).

In 1997 she was hired as director and general manager of the WOUB Center for Public Media at Ohio University. Her 14 years there brought a multimillion dollar fundraising campaign to convert WOUB's television stations to digital transmission and a move on the radio side from jazz and music to more news programming, a change she defended as bringing accurate news to communities that could not get it anywhere else. Nationally she sat on the board of trustees of the Association of Public Television Stations and the board of the National Educational Telecommunications Association, and chaired the PBS Advertising and Promotion Advisory Committee.

She also taught at West Virginia University and, as an adjunct, in Ohio University's School of Media Arts and Studies and School of Communication Studies, covering media management, ethics, women and the media and organisational communication. She mentored generations of WOUB students and counted the broadcasters Matt Barnes and Allie LaForce among those who had passed through the station. She retired in 2011, and in 2013 the Ohio University Board of Trustees named her director and general manager emerita.

In 1995 a benign tumour in her spinal cord left Lewis completely paralysed and required an 11 hour operation. She never fully regained her mobility for good: every four or five years she would lose it again and return to rehabilitation, and she survived sepsis and bleeding on the brain. She used a wheelchair for long periods and turned the experience into advocacy, serving on the Athens City Commission on Disabilities and the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities and hosting a WOUB programme on disability, access and inclusion.

In retirement she wrote Love and Loss: The Storied Nature of Nursing Home Care, co-founded the Dr. Carolyn Foster Bailey Lewis Family Foundation and a greeting card business with her daughter, sat on the Ohio University Alumni Association board and became an ordained minister. She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2005 she established the Robert F. Lewis Jr. Memorial Fund at Ohio University to support students at WOUB. She was the mother of Carey I. Bailey and Dr. Caryn M. Bailey.

Lewis is remembered as a pioneer who opened the leadership of American public broadcasting to Black women. She said she knew she "had to get it right for those coming behind me." She was inducted into the West Virginia University journalism hall of fame, and in 2024 Ohio University created the Dr. Carolyn Bailey Lewis Leadership Award, an endowed fund supporting student leaders at WOUB every year.