Spotlighting the work of women in the civil rights movement’s Freedom Rides

“Who the hell is Diane Nash?”

That was Attorney General Robert Kennedy, barking a disparaging greeting over the phone to one of his deputies, John Seigenthaler.

It was a little over 50 years ago, May 16, 1961, to be exact. Two days earlier, on Mother’s Day, a group of Freedom Riders — young, mostly student activists challenging the South’s segregation laws by traveling on buses over state lines — had been set upon and beaten by a mob of white supremacists near Anniston, Ala. The bus they rode on, a Greyhound, was fire-bombed and destroyed. In Birmingham, the occupants of another Freedom Rider bus, a Trailways, had also been assaulted.

Nash, then a student at Fisk University and a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was about to dispatch a new group of Riders to take the place of those who had been attacked. They would travel from Nashville to Birmingham to New Orleans....