Nearly four decades after the Gee's Bend ferry stopped running, a new vessel is once again crossing the Alabama River, connecting the mostly black residents of Gee's Bend to Camden, the seat of Wilcox County.

For 78-year-old Willie Quill Pettway, it's long overdue.

"Yeah, I want it to come back. That's what you call winning," Pettway says. "It didn't last. Treating me wrong don't last."

The "wrong" that Pettway is talking about was shutting down the ferry in 1962, stranding most of the poor voters who didn't own cars back then. to drive the 40 miles around a peninsula that is locked in by the river's muddy waters. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used the water's divide as a civil rights rallying point.