Carolina Alumni Review - September/October 2011

“Isolating schools by race and socioeconomic status would set our inner-city schools up for failure,” Redenbaugh said in accepting her award. “We had never discussed the very taboo Award from the John F.

Kennedy Library
Her
Ground
Foundation. Wael Ghonim
and the people of Egypt
were honored for their
demands for reform that led
to a revolution and drove a
president from office.

Redenbaugh was honored for opposing school redistricting in New Hanover

New Hanover County school board member Elizabeth Swaim Redenbaugh ’ 90 received the JFK Library Foundation’s Profile in Courage Award from Caroline Kennedy.

Elizabeth Swaim

School board
member wins
JFK Courage
Award

County. The situations might differ in scale, but, in

Redenbaugh ’ 90 had
never been a rabble-
rouser. She was a mem-
ber of the Junior
Caroline Kennedy’s words,
they are equal as “individual acts of conscience.”
League who practiced
family law after major-
ing in criminal justice at UNC and receiving a
Carolina law degree in 1993. In Wilmington —
with its iconic history of racial struggle —
Redenbaugh was not an activist. That is, not
until the day she stood at a school bus stop lis-
tening to some mothers make scathing remarks
about people who opposed redistricting plans
that would reinstitute neighborhood schools.
(Opponents feared moving to a neighborhood
school plan would lead to a racial and socioeco-
nomic segregation.) Incensed, Redenbaugh
decided to run for the county school board and
oppose the powerful and popular neighborhood
schools movement. “I lost friendships,”
Redenbaugh says. “But I knew with my heart
this was the right thing to do.”
Redenbaugh had two allies accompany her
to the awards ceremony — school board mem-
ber Dorothy Shields and former board member
Nick Rhodes. Asked why she had been singled
out for recognition, Redenbaugh says that
“what tipped the scales for the selection com-
mittee was a letter that I had written in email
that became an editorial in the Wilmington Star-
News, ‘A Gutsy Stand.’ ” Redenbaugh had writ-
ten: “Sending any child from any background to
a school where, based upon data, I know will be
a failing school does not assist our district in
accomplishing its mission. In fact, I consider
such a vote to be unconscionable.”
When the board voted for the redistricting,
Redenbaugh did not waver. She refused to sign
a certification to state authorities that the coun-
ty had not increased segregation of schools on
the basis of race or socioeconomic status.

In May, Redenbaugh stood beside the Internet activist credited with sparking Egypt’s uprising as each received a Profile in Courage

issue of racism, and I had in the past one too
many encounters with neighborhood school
supporters where it was made abundantly clear
they did not care about the poor and minority
children of our community. I prayed and made
the decision to be brutally honest on both
counts.”
In her remarks, Kennedy praised all three
school board members. “They reminded us all
that education remains the civil rights issue of
our time,” she said.

TOM FITZSIMMONS/KENNEDY LIBRARY FOUNDATION

— Susan Simone

Read the acceptance speech Elizabeth Redenbaugh prepared for the Profile in Courage Awards and an email to the New Hanover County school board that was published as an editorial, “A Gutsy Stand,” in the Wilmington Star-News in 2009: