Paul Parks, state, city education official; 86

Mr. Parks, who spent most of his 58 years in Boston fulfilling an obligation he felt “to give back to other folks some of the things I was given,’’ died at his Mattapan home yesterday of cancer. He was 86.

An engineer by training, he moved to Boston in 1951 and soon became part of the civil rights struggle, serving as a leader of the city’s NAACP chapter. He was 44 in late 1967 when Mayor-elect Kevin H. White appointed him to head the Model Cities program, which used federal money to improve neglected areas of Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Roxbury.

In 1974, Michael S. Dukakis was putting together his first administration as governor when he chose Mr. Parks to serve as education secretary. He was the first black appointed to Dukakis’s Cabinet. Nearly two decades later, Mayor Raymond L. Flynn named Mr. Parks chairman of the Boston School Committee as it switched from being an elected to an appointed panel.

“He was one of the first citizens of the city, no question about it,’’ said Dukakis, who had long encouraged Mr. Parks to write a book about the history he had lived.

“When he came to Boston, if you were black, you couldn’t live on this side of the railroad tracks,’’ Dukakis said. “And yet he develops an engineering practice, gets deeply involved in politics, deeply involved in civil rights and desegregation. When you think back at the indignity of this and him emerging on the other side as a hugely respected community leader, it’s quite a story.’’

Dukakis praised Mr. Parks as a consensus builder, a skill he needed when Flynn tapped him to lead the School Committee.

“When we went through the whole process of reorganizing and reforming public education in Boston, Paul stood shoulder to shoulder with me, despite the fact that it was quite unpopular to many people in the city,’’ Flynn said.

Never shying from a challenge, Mr. Parks was blunt in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in December 1974 after Dukakis appointed him education secretary.

“My goal,’’ he said, “will be to redevelop and redesign education at all levels of the state.’’

He learned to be ambitious while growing up in what he described as “an intense Negro ghetto’’ in Indianapolis. His father was a disabled World War I veteran, his mother a social worker who pushed her children to value education and succeed.

“I owe it to a strong, driving mother and a teacher who kept making sense out of a life other than what I knew as a Negro,’’ he said in a 1967 interview with the Globe, speaking of his success.

Mr. Parks said that while in high school, he won an oratory contest that provided a $4,000 scholarship he used to study civil engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

His college years were interrupted by World War II. He served in the US Army in Europe, and his accounts of his military service later became the subject of controversy.

Mr. Parks said he went ashore on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on D-Day in 1944 and was present when the Dachau concentration camp was liberated in 1945. Others in the military who were there or had studied military records, however, said he could not have been at either location on the days he cited.

The Globe published several articles about the discrepancies in October 2000, when the Berlin chapter of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith gave Mr. Parks an award named for Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands from Nazi gas chambers during the Holocaust. Mr. Parks stood by his accounts, and the Berlin B’nai B’rith chapter announced nearly two years later that he could keep the award.

“Although there is no eyewitness support for Parks’s claims, neither is there any eyewitness refutation, and his US military records are not inconsistent with his account,’’ the organization said in August 2002.

After World War II, Mr. Parks returned to Indiana and used the GI Bill to finish at Purdue. He married Dorothy Alexander in 1947, and four years later they moved to Boston, where they raised their two children and Mr. Parks initially worked for engineering firms. The couple divorced in 1971.

Mr. Parks then married Virginia Loftman.

During Boston’s school desegregation years, while he was education secretary, Mr. Parks sometimes rode on buses with black students en route to South Boston High School and shielded them as rocks crashed through windows.

“That was very scary, but I was more afraid for the kids,’’ he told the Globe in 1992, recalling how he pushed students to the floor of the bus during some of those rides. “It was an awful thing for them to go through. It wasn’t that easy for me, either.’’

It was worth it, however, for someone who had attended segregated schools and insisted that Boston move beyond what he had endured as a child.

“Even if we had the best teachers available and the best physical plant, we still would want the schools integrated, because the Negro child is not getting an equal education,’’ he told the Boston Herald in 1965, when he was education secretary of Boston’s NAACP chapter.

Mr. Parks, who occasionally wrote book reviews for the Globe, was known for being impeccably dressed during his years in state and city government, his suits often set off with a flashy tie. His voice was just as noticeable.

“He commanded a presence because he had this peculiar voice that when he spoke, people listened,’’ Flynn recalled. “It was almost like a voice from up high.’’

In addition to his wife, Mr. Parks leaves a son, Paul Jr. of Cumberland, R.I.; two daughters, Pamela Parks McLaurin of Milton and Stacey Parks Townsend of Canton; a sister, Dorothy Jean Parks of Quincy; and four grandchildren.

A service will be announced.