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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.

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?