She ran a public TV station when no one in the room looked like her. Carolyn Bailey Lewis died at 78.

Carolyn Bailey Lewis, the first Black woman to run a full-service public television station in the continental United States, died Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio. She was 78.

Lewis spent 38 years in public broadcasting, in a job where, she told WOUB, the Ohio University station she later led, “I would go to meetings and nobody looked like me.” She stayed anyway. “I knew I had to get it right for those coming behind me,” she said.

She was born in Pittsburgh in 1948 and raised in Bluefield, West Virginia, by her great aunt, Thelma Stone, who ran a hotel. Lewis recalled to WOUB that she grew up around the performers who stayed there, among them Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, Sam Cooke and Little Richard.

At West Virginia University she became the first Black woman to graduate from the Perley I. Reed School of Journalism, in 1971. She went on to earn a master’s degree there. In 1972 she joined WNPB-TV in Morgantown, and in the early 1990s she was named its general manager, the first African American woman to hold that post at a full-service public television station in the continental U.S.

In 1997 she moved to Ohio University to lead the WOUB Center for Public Media, where she was the first woman and the first African American general manager. She stayed until 2011. Ohio University’s trustees named her director and general manager emerita two years later.

Lewis also earned a Ph.D. in communication studies from Ohio University’s Scripps College of Communication and taught media ethics, organizational communication and gender leadership at both universities. She became an ordained minister, and she wrote Love and Loss: The Storied Nature of Nursing Home Care. In 2005 she set up the Robert F. Lewis Jr. Memorial Fund at Ohio University.

Public broadcasters still have few Black leaders at the top, and she held that seat decades before it was common to see anyone in it who looked like her. She did it from Appalachia, in two small university-town stations, not from a network headquarters.

Lewis is survived by her son, Carey I. Bailey, her daughter, Dr. Caryn M. Bailey, and two grandchildren.