The Freedom’s Sisters exhibit at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum delivers its raison d’être right at the entrance. As the door opens, a video begins playing. A woman interviews young children, asking them to identify their heroes. One boy chooses Abraham Lincoln. Others name superheroes, with Superman a popular choice. Not one child names a woman.

This exhibit, developed by the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, aims to remedy that. Freedom’s Sisters, which is coming to the end of its three-year nationwide tour, celebrates the accomplishments of 20 African-American women, ranging from the famous—Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King—to the less well known, such as Sonia Sanchez, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Mary Church Terrell. In the case of the former, the exhibit manages to breathe life into stories that have over the years become two-dimensional. For the latter, it serves as an introduction to the lives of women who have not been sufficiently recognized. Many, though active in the civil rights movement, were overshadowed by men in the media portrayals of the time and the history books that came after, as exhibition materials point out.

Panels with photographs and brief written descriptions make up much of the exhibit, with most women receiving one panel of explanation. With only 20 women and the whole of American history with which to grapple, Freedom’s Sisters dispenses with chronology. The result can be a little disorienting: The panel on Coretta Scott King, for instance, is sandwiched on the back of Harriet Tubman’s display. The chosen women, long left out of our national story, are thus not so much inserted back into it as celebrated as a thing apart. While some panels include small sidebars that provide some context—a description of the Black Panthers accompanies the panel on Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge Cleaver’s wife), for example—many do not. In other places, though, the historical setting is better depicted. The section on activist and educator Septima Poinsette Clark is accompanied by an in-depth description of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee—the training ground for civil rights activists where she taught—and the literacy centers known as Citizenship Schools, which she established. As a result, one comes away with a much fuller picture of Clark than, say, of Frances Watkins Harper, an early female abolitionist speaker who gets a pretty bare bones treatment.

In general, the written descriptions tend to be a bit too textbookish, complete with bulleted lists of “Major Accomplishments.” But many displays also include interactive or multimedia elements: buttons to push, levers to pull, audio or video to take in. And it is these elements that make a given portrayal either a gem or a dud. Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most famous African-American woman of all time, comes vibrantly to life once more through the power of a touch screen. The multimedia material focuses on her role as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and provides everything from a lesson on the era’s torpedoes to a game—navigating a boat around those torpedoes—to a verbal history of the Combahee River Raid, which Tubman led, resulting in the release of nearly 800 slaves. This story is told in vivid detail, the way history should be. The speaker (in Tubman’s own words) talks of rescuing “a woman with a pail on her head, rice a-smoking in it,” children hanging all about her and a pig suspended from a bag on her back.

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