In 2011, Karen Grigsby Bates ’73 traveled to Orlando, Fla., microphone in hand, and did what she does best: She listened carefully, then masterfully shared a story. Then a correspondent for NPR’s National Desk, Bates was reporting on the surviving pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, often known as the Tuskegee Airmen, some of America’s first Black pilots.
They were revered inside many Black communities in the U.S., but were mostly unknown to the rest of the country. After training in the early 1940s, they were quickly sent to fight in Europe. By 2011, they were in their 80s and 90s. The men, one by one, opened up to Bates about their experiences. One, whom Bates described as “a small man with a precise silver mustache,” spoke about being gunned down out of the sky, then surviving nine months in Germany as a prisoner of war. Another flew 48 missions and narrowly missed being shot down—another pilot had taken his place at the last minute.
And then, like a punch to the gut, Bates describes their return. Coming back home into New York Harbor, they received the opposite of a hero’s welcome. As pilot Alex Jefferson described, “Coming back on the boat, got to New York Harbor and the flags waving, Statue of Liberty, walked down the gangplank. A little white soldier at the bottom says: Whites to the right, n***** to the left … You talk about startling. God.”
Despite facing racism at home, the airmen took immense pride in their experiences and were generous with their time. “Prejudice be damned,” Bates recalls now, “this was their country, too. They were going to be pilots.”
Stories like these are the cornerstone of Bates’ career—she is one of the country’s most prolific journalists and writers on race in America and the human experience. After reporting stories nationally for NPR, she became a founding member of NPR’s award-winning Code Switch podcast, which was named show of the year by Apple and one of Time magazine’s best podcasts of all time. She also received the 2023 Gwen Ifill Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation for her mentorship and trailblazing reporting on race. She has written two mystery novels and is co-author of the best-selling etiquette book Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times. She has also been a reporter for People and Time, and a contributing columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
When Bates and her team founded Code Switch, the podcast was one of the first to tackle race, culture, and society in such a refreshingly direct way. Bates began one episode with “OK, so we all know race is a social construct, right?”
Bates’ passion for writing and storytelling started when she was a child in Connecticut. Her sister recently showed her a story she had written when she was around 6 years old, about a little mouse named Christopher. She remembers her dad wondering out loud why she didn’t want to read the newspaper. (She was about 9.) “Because it’s prejudiced,” she said. “You never see people who look like us unless they’ve robbed a bank or done something that was terrible … if someone just dropped in they’d think this is all Negro people do, commit crimes, get caught for shoplifting.” Point made; her dad brought home a different newspaper.
Bates chose Wellesley after connecting with several persuasive Black students and alumnae, including Janet McDonald Hill ’69, who had lunch with her and then said, “You can’t imagine going anywhere else, right?”
The Wellesley she joined, she says, was steeped in tradition and formality, complete with dress requirements and desserts on doilies at tea. But in the second semester of her freshman year—the spring of 1970—everything changed. Students joined the movement to oppose the Vietnam War, and outdated social systems and structures were being thrown out. During one all-College meeting, she recalls, an upperclass student stood up and said, “This is bulls***, the world is burning, people are dying, and we’re arguing about whether or not we have to sign out?”
Just like that, the campus changed. Parietals went away, along with the requirement to wear skirts at tea. Her class of 1973, she says, learned to raise hell and continued to do so long after they left. “We haven’t ever really calmed down,” she says. “We are wreaking havoc still by asking questions that make people uncomfortable.”
Those years, along with her life experience, gave Bates a firm understanding of the hierarchy that existed in the United States. “What interested me was how people lived with the decisions that people who were in the position to make those decisions made,” she says. Making the unseen visible is an ethos she has carried throughout her career in journalism.
She remembers President Bill Clinton in the 1990s promising to change welfare as we knew it, and the conversation around the benefit being a “free ride.” She says she thought, “Dude, if you’ve ever seen how people on welfare live or been behind someone counting their WIC coupons so they could get formula for their 1-year-old and juice for their 6-year-old … . You have no idea what people do in order to present themselves to the world so they’re not automatically dismissed.” She visited people in food pantries and listened to their stories, spotlighting the rise of hunger in America. “It wasn’t old guys who lived by themselves and needed a couple of cans of peas and bread,” she recalls. “It was families who were hungry, and people who had never had this experience.”
When COVID shut the country down in 2020, she spoke on NPR about why COVID patients of color became sicker and were more likely to die from the virus. In an award-winning feature for Wellesley magazine in fall 2020, she told the story of Zoe Mungin ’11, a young alum who died of COVID after her illness was dismissed as asthma and a panic attack, and she was turned away from a hospital twice.
She’s also covered the phenomenon of nosy “Karens,” revisited the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and reported on how Black and Brown workers were mostly left to clean up the mess of Jan. 6.
“Race has never not been a part of how I’ve lived,” she says. “You absorbed this stuff as you went along, whether at dinner or Sunday school. It was a great counterbalance to the mainstream narrative we were often being fed by people who didn’t look like us.”
“Being able to make visible some of those things,” Bates says, “was something I really felt the need to do.”
