Community leader Kinkead lives a rich life of the mind

Corey J. Allen

For lifetime activist Gareth Kinkead Jr., it all starts in the mind.
The mental exercise of first building a goal in the mind, then constructing the reality has given Kinkead the power to lead a life of breaking barriers and building communities.

Kinkead’s lifetime of work will be honored at an 80th birthday celebration organized by his wife Annie on Saturday at the Venezia Club in Boston. Mayor Thomas M. Menino will attend the event, along with people throughout the community with whom Kinkead has worked over the years.

“I had no more idea of what I was doing than the man on the moon,” said Kinkead. “But for me as a husband, a father and a black man, coming up in a predominantly integrated community, I had to show some kind of leadership to my kids.”

Born the only son of a Jamaican father and Native American mother and raised on Roxbury’s Whiting Avenue, Kinkead grew up like most urban youth in that time — hard, with his parents working to make ends meet during and after the Great Depression.

“I am used to three-deckers,” Kinkead said. “Sometimes, my playground was the roof of a three-decker. We’d be playing tag and we’d be hopping from one building to the other. Some of us made it, some of us didn’t.”

Kinkead’s mother and father separated when he was young, but he kept on pushing, charting a path through the Boston and Cambridge Public School system and graduating at 17. After graduation, Kinkead enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he served for two and a half years, returning to Boston after receiving an honorable discharge following World War I.

With his first wife, Doris Bradley Kinkead, he raised his two children, Gareth III and Gloria, in Dorchester. He wanted a single family home and found a “jewel” in an area of Mattapan that was totally unbeknownst to the community of color.

“We’re going back in time, back into the seventies,” said Kinkead. “This was the time when the banks were redlining certain areas where blacks would be sold homes, and all around that perimeter we wouldn’t be sold homes. This was, to us black families, like the American Dream.”

Black families began to move into the area and before long, the face of the neighborhood changed. Folks from Roxbury, Dorchester and other neighborhoods found a suburban setting within city limits.

“The American Dream now has now come to reality for the Soul Brother,” Kinkead joked in his best radio personality voice. “I’ve got a ranch house and I don’t have to move too far. People of color didn’t even know this existed. The only thing we knew in Mattapan was Blue Hill Avenue.”

In 1970, Kinkead got his piece of the American pie at 54 Messenger St. It was exciting, he said, to go from living in multiple family homes to having one of his own. But while having the privacy of a single-family home was great, there was something missing: working with your neighbors.

In Boston’s black communities during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, neighborhood families communicated, spent leisure time together, borrowed brown sugar from one another and generally functioned as a unit for protection and supervision of both their children and their dreams of prosperity. Kinkead remembers the day he realized things went a little differently in Mattapan, at the expense of one of his neighbors.

With the introduction of black families into the neighborhood, many of the area’s moderate Jewish families started selling their homes and moving out of the neighborhood. Two young women were lying in lounge chairs on the grass when a large truck pulled up to a house across the street.

But this was no moving truck. This was the repo man.

“They took off the front door, but the girls didn’t know that,” said Kinkead, telling the tale as he rolls down the Messenger Street hill in his white Cadillac. “They moved all of the furniture out, went down [to the cellar], disconnected the furnace and took out of the copper tubing and everything.”

When the family came home to find their door removed and their house cleaned out, they spilled into the street, screaming and looking for help from the neighbors they barely knew. Kinkead, who was mowing his lawn a block down, went up the street to see what was happening.

“They were saying, ‘My goodness, we’ve been robbed!’” Kinkead said. “And the girls who were laying down on lawn chairs across the street said, ‘Oh, we thought you were moving.’

“Consequently, the light bulb went on, and … I said to myself, ‘The people aren’t even talking to each other.’”

After this incident, Kinkead visited his neighbors in the winter between 1970 and 1971 and made a pact with them.

“I just moved in here at 54 [Messenger], and if you see a truck or anything backed up to my house, please call the police,” Kinkead told them. “I just got here, so I’m not moving out. Please, do that, and I will look out for you.”

Neighbors started bringing their lawn chairs to Kinkead’s backyard or periodically meeting in his basement. This was the genesis of the Messenger Street Association, which put on events like the community day at Almont Park but also worked together for the safety of the community.

Crime was high in the area, with rape, robbery and break-ins all too common. Purse snatchers targeted young ladies walking home from school or work after getting off the buses running along Cummings Highway. Knowing that the robbers would often run down one of the side streets to enter Almont Park at the end of Favre Street, Kinkead got a 10-foot fence that would be locked from time to time at the park’s entrance.

“When they come, by the time they get up over this thing, somebody would be able to grab them, or at least the purse,” he said.

Kinkead organized the Shangri-La Security Patrol, which included everyone from men in the community patrolling the streets, ladies sitting on their porch communicating by walkie-talkie and even paperboys who would write down descriptions and license plate numbers of suspicious people.

“All I want is a decent place to live,” Kinkead said. “And if I have to fight for it, [I will]. I think one person can make a difference. But if you get a lot of people together, standing united, my goodness, you’ve got some strength and some power.”

He also used the crime as a motivation to make good use of Almont Park, organizing the back of the park and starting the Shangri-La Garden, which is handicap accessible from the street to planting beds and is hooked up with a water hose.

The garden has a path called “Turner Lane,” named after Joseph Turner, an original member of the garden group who passed away. “His soul has to be in here somewhere,” Kinkead said.

Kinkead continues advocating for the community on a state and local level and taking on grassroots projects like modernizing the Mattahunt Community School and the Ernst Chery Mother and Tot Lot, named after a community resident who as a young man had two open heart surgeries, and he has long since moved from Messenger to Colorado Street and renamed the civic organization the Colorado Street Citizens Group.

But the garden has kept the Shangri-La title, which also graces a walking club and a bowling club in the area of Mattapan surrounding Almont Park and the Mattahunt Community School.

Kinkead borrowed Shangri-La from the movie “Lost Horizons.” The name refers to a wondrous place in the mountains of Tibet where you stop aging, the sun always shines and no one ever wants to leave.

As he walked through Almont Park, Kinkead explained the connection between name and neighborhood.

“Shangri-La is what they call the mythical paradise on earth,” he said. “It starts [with] you and me, but in the mind.”