Kathleen Bond: What Can I Do Today to Make a Difference?

This article was developed from two oral history interviews that Lu Ann Jones conducted with Kathleen M. Bond in April of 2020. It is part of Women’s Voices: Women in the National Park Service Oral History Project, made possible by a grant from the National Park Foundation. Recordings, transcripts, and supporting materials will be housed at the NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.

---

Kathleen Bond as a new superintendent.

Courtesy of Kathleen Bond

As Kathleen Bond’s career with the National Park Service developed in Natchez, Mississippi, she was able to make good on a long-time pledge “to be part of a generation that could bring some change” to her native state. Fresh historical interpretations and community partnerships have invigorated Natchez National Historical Park, where in the past 29 years Bond has advanced from museum technician to park superintendent.

"Loved What I Was Doing”

Bond arrived at the park at a fortuitous time. The park was just five years old, and it was initiating important studies to guide resource management and interpretation. In addition to her museum tech work, she also supported scholars who were hired to write general management plans, historic resource studies, historic structures reports, and cultural landscape reports. “I never said no to a task,” she said, “because I loved what I was doing.”

By the early 2000s, Bond was the park’s museum curator, assuming broad cultural resources management responsibilities and advancing in grade. NPS supervisors identified her leadership potential, and in 2006 named Bond the park’s superintendent. “I’ve been so blessed in many ways,” she said. “I’ve been terrible at choosing a career path and making a plan and sticking to a plan. That just is not how it’s happened. Doors and windows have opened and I’ve fallen through them all the way along.”

Bond realized that Natchez National Historical Park joined a tourism industry that since the 1930s had built its identity around the “moonlight and magnolias” mythology of the antebellum South and glorifying the Confederacy. Good scholarship, she believed, needed to underpin interpretation and resource management. As the National Park Service prepared to observe the Civil War Sesquicentennial between 2011 and 2015, Bond tasked the new park historian to produce new Civil War-era research on every historic house open for tours.

The past turned out to be more complicated than most people imagined. Loyalties were divided, and some white Natchez residents had sided with the Union cause. After Union forces occupied the town in 1863, research revealed, Federal officers and the Natchez elite socialized, building alliances across lines of race and class.

Melrose Estate backyard in 1905.

NPS / Natchez National Historical Park Archives

• Kathleen Bond: Complexity of History

  
  

  During an oral history interview, Kathleen Bond describes her interest in sharing history.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS Park History Program

  Date created:

  03/11/2022

  Audio Transcript

  BOND: You know, history’s always way more interesting than the sterilized tropes that we rely on. I love the complexity and the richness and the surprise and being able to share that.

• Kathleen Bond: A Park Leader

  
  

  Bond describes her focus as superintendent of Natchez National Historical Park.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS Park History Program

  Date created:

  03/11/2022

  Audio Transcript

  BOND: But it wasn’t welcomed by everyone. Some people wanted to keep their mythology. They liked their stories.
  So I think in my years as superintendent, I’m not so worried about changing what other people are doing. I’m more worried about being strategic in the management decisions I make for our park and making our park as good as it can be and as strong a leader as it can be. And then other people can choose to follow. Or not.

As both an insider and an outsider, Bond has been uniquely situated to introduce new ideas in a tradition-bound place where African American residents are the majority but white residents historically have called the shots. She’s a white native of Mississippi who has come to understand the tortured history of race relations in the state.

She also represents a federal agency charged with telling a broad story of America. With a foot in both worlds, “I hope that I’m able to translate one to the other, back and forth, in a good way. I love doing that. I love being able to bring the goals and the missions of one to the other.” Part of her job is to “speak truth to power” and “deliver a hard message lovingly.”

• Kathleen Bond: "Unlearning is hard"

  
  

  In an oral history interview with the Park History Program, Bond acknowledges the multiple versions of the history of Natchez.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS Park History Program

  Date created:

  03/11/2022

  Audio Transcript

  BOND: I get frustrated with Natchez and its tourism/history that has been so twisted and sterilized into a version of the Old South that has then warped all the generations that were taught that. And unlearning is hard.

“Natchez is a beautiful place,” and “there’s traditions here that just need to be changed. I think the National Park Service has a lot to offer this town to understand its own past. To understand its own past, and to understand their lives. It tears me up every day to do what I do.”

Contemporary view of the front of the main house at Melrose Estate.

NPS

Breaking Silences about the Past

In 2016 the NPS celebrated its hundredth anniversary, and Natchez observed its Tricentennial since completion of the first French fort. As part of the NPS commemorative theme Civil War to Civil Rights, Bond and her staff expanded the park’s interpretation and researched untold civil rights stories. From Dr. Betty Cade, an African American member of the Tricentennial committee, Bond learned about civil rights protests, church fire bombings, and unjustified arrests of African American Natchez residents that had gone unacknowledged. The women decided that one story in particular, what became known as the Parchman Ordeal, had been hidden for too long.

The story began in October 1965.

• Kathleen Bond: The Parchman Ordeal

  
  

  In an oral history interview, Kathleen Bond describes the events of 1965 which came to be known as the Parchman Ordeal.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS Park History Program

  Date created:

  03/11/2022

  Audio Transcript

  BOND: It came shortly after the Voting Rights Act was passed, when people began to push their politicians to enforce the law, to let people vote. We had several industrial plants in town that were unionized and completely segregated. Which is really hard for me to think of. Separate cafeterias, separate restrooms, separate lines that they worked on. The KKK had infiltrated these plants. Some of the leaders in the NAACP worked in these plants. When George Metcalf was the first who was advanced, the members of the KKK thought that an African American should not have that job. It should be a white man’s job. They blew up his truck in the parking lot. He was not killed. But that sparked protests of people meeting and marching to the city hall with lists of demands. Demands as radical as being called “Mrs. Smith” instead of “Jane.” As radical as being hired onto the police department and fire department and put on the school board. It was, you know, in fifty years retrospect completely reasonable, but radical at the time.
  
  The governor sent in the National Guard to keep order. The African American community raised up a chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice to protect African American lives. There was real fear that there was going to be serious violence breaking out.
  
  So, the first week in October, locals determined to march, even though the mayor had-- there was an ordinance that banned it. They left from African American churches. Didn’t even get down the street. They were put onto public school buses and taken to the city auditorium as a holding pen. And then in the dark of night, they were put back on buses. If they were older than twelve, they were driven more than five hours through the darkness to Parchman Penitentiary and kept in horrible, abusive conditions for three or four days, and then told that if someone could come get them, they could—they were never charged with a crime. It was a horrible, abusive—and when their families were going up to get them, some of them were stopped and threatened with their lives. Horrible thing.

“Those people, the two hundred people who were sent to Parchman Penitentiary unjustly came home and didn’t talk about it,” Bond explained. “Generations had grown up and didn’t know about it. And it needed to be told.”

Bond wrote a briefing statement about the Parchman Ordeal. After being presented with these findings, the Natchez mayor and Board of Aldermen issued an apology. Other committee members conducted oral history interviews and produced a film documentary and a book. Eventually public and private partners commissioned a memorial to the Parchman Ordeal. The monument is titled “Proud to Take a Stand.” “Real things,” Bond said, “came out of that [grassroots campaign].”

Only by having a more holistic understanding of the past, Bond believes, can people live and work together amicably and equitably today.

• Kathleen Bond: Towards Understanding

  
  

  In an oral history with the Park History Program, Kathleen Bond speaks about personal burden of education towards a fuller understanding of African American history and experiences.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS Park History Program

  Date created:

  03/11/2022

  Audio Transcript

  BOND: It’s how do we live in relationship with each other when there can be so much ignorance. That’s where you just need education, and sometimes the education is better coming from within. So that’s where I sort of stand with one foot in both worlds. But it’s also, I have done a lot of study over the last twenty years in terms of racial diversity and inclusion in African American history. I have so much ground to make up.
  
  It is not the burden of the African American community to educate me; it’s my burden. But I want to share that with the people around me, because it’s my failure. And we can’t have racial reconciliation, which is Dr. King’s dream, until we have understanding. So, you know, you wake up in the morning and you say, what can I do today?

An 1856 map of the area around the Forks of the Road market buildings. Survey of St. Catharine [sic] St. at Forks of the Road, August 1, 1856, by Thos. Kenny, City Surveyor. Side 1. From Series 2051: Natchez Municipal Records, 1795-1982.

Courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Suffering and Beauty

As a historian chosen to lead a park, Bond has been something of a rarity in the NPS. Superintendents have more often risen from the ranks of law enforcement rangers and park administrators than cultural resources professionals. Bond encourages regional directors to “think outside the box” when hiring, and she encourages cultural resources staff to set their sights on a superintendency. Although she had a lot to learn about the myriad responsibilities that a park’s chief steward assumes, she in turn has demonstrated that the ways a historian is trained to think—to ask critical questions, to evaluate the evidence, to consider multiple perspectives—are an advantage to park management.

When she became superintendent in 2006, a supervisor visited the park and admired how invested Bond was in connecting with Natchez partners. “But he cautioned me,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You care about the community. Don’t wear yourself out. You can’t save them all.’ So I carry those words with me. You know, it’s easy to get emotionally involved with the mission and the people, individually. But you just do have to be mindful of not wearing yourself out.”

That said, in 2021 Bond and community activists realized a long-standing goal of commemorating one of the country’s largest slave markets. Between 1833 and 1863, traders and enslavers met at Forks of the Road to buy and sell thousands of men, women, and children. The dedication ceremony, covered by the New York Times, attracted local, state, and federal officials and residents who had long championed Forks of the Road recognition. Here was an occasion for education, for those in attendance to reckon with the cruel paradox that the architectural beauty of Natchez, as Bond said that day, was “built on an atrocity of violence and suffering and torture.” Here was another “opportunity to tell the truth”; here was another answer to the question, “what can I do today” to make a difference?

Kathleen Bond, left, with Jonathan B. Jarvis, former NPS director, and Laura Gates, former superintendent of Cane River Creole National Historic Site.

Courtesy of Kathleen Bond

Resources

• Boykin, Patrice. 2022. "Bond honored with Thad Cochran Humanities Achievement Award at 2022 NLCC." MageeNews.com, March 1. https://mageenews.com/bond-honored-with-thad-cochran-humanities-achievement-award-at-2022-nlcc/

 

• Demby, Devonte. 2014. "Through her vision: Natchez superintendent receives National Park Service honor." The Natchez Democrat, December 14. https://www.natchezdemocrat.com/2014/12/14/through-her-vision-natchez-superintendent-receives-national-park-service-honor/

 

• Lichtenstein, Brad and Yoruba Richen. "American Reckoning." PBS Frontline, Season 2022, Episode 13, February 15, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/american-reckoning/

 

• Mendoza, Bishette. 2021. "How a Slave Market Became a National Park Service Site." New York Times, July 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/us/forks-of-the-road-national-park.html

 

• Natchez National Historical Park website

Lu Ann Jones is the oral history program coordinator for the National Park Service Park History Program in Washington, DC. Learn more at the NPS Oral History Website.