Parks (Paul) is born in Indianapolis.

Paul Parks graduates from Crispus Attucks High School and Purdue University, serves in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Europe and the South Pacific in World War II, and arrives in Boston in 1951 to work for the Stone & Webster engineering company. He becomes active in the Citizens for the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Branch NAACP in the early 1960s, becomes administrator of the City of Boston’s Model Cities program, Massachusetts Secretary of Education in 1974, and chairman of the first appointed Boston School Committee in 1992. Parks dies on Martha’s Vineyard on July 31, 2009.