Deep in Alabama’s Black Belt, the village of Gee’s Bend is almost an island, cut off by a loop in the Alabama River. The ferry that linked the Bend to Camden, the local county seat, was stopped by white segregationists in 1962, and not reinstated until 2006. Once enslaved plantation workers, then sharecroppers, then struggling New Deal farmers, the people of the Bend remained largely unnoticed by mainstream history, despite Martin Luther King’s visit in 1965 a few weeks before the civil rights march on Selma.