Mr. Petri Hawkins Byrd has an urgent message to encourage mentoring in our nation’s African-American community. Television audiences know him affectionately as Byrd on the Emmy Award winning television show “Judge Judy.” However, Petri is a man on a mission, intent on leveraging his celebrity and determined to do whatever it takes, to make a positive difference in our nation’s black communities.
Mr. Byrd serves as the National Chairman of the O.K. Program, whose mission is mentoring African-American youth. The O.K. Program, which stands for Our Kids, distinguishes itself from other black youth mentoring organizations by the fact that it is coordinated by police officers. When police officers become mentors for at-risk youth, monitor behavior, offer guidance and become advocates for the youth, Petri believes good things will happen to stem the tide of bad choices, drugs, violence and despair which are epidemic in our communities.
Today, 72% of all African-American families live in a single-parent household, along with a 50% high school drop-out rate of African-American males, and an ever-increasing black population in our nation’s prisons, there is indeed a significant cause for concern.
This plight of the African-America family can be attributed in large part to the absence of the father in the home. This is a story that Petri Hawkins Byrd himself knows all too well.
Growing up in the tough Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Petri and his siblings faced many of the same challenges of today’s youth. “My father was an intravenous drug user and a drug dealer who spent most of his time locked-up, in prison or in rehab,” states Petri. For all practical purposes, he grew up on welfare, in a single-parent household.
On occasions when his father was home, he offered young Petri counsel on life; this was of course between the addict’s incoherent nod and shooting up in the bathroom. Although his father possessed a brilliant mind, it was the way he chose to live his life that was troubling. “My father was the antithesis of everything I believed in, and everything I looked up to and respected,” says Petri.
As a young boy, he experienced a life changing moment. One night he, his siblings and mother all huddled around their 19-inch black & white television to watch WOR TV’s Million Dollar Movie. “The movie was ‘The Miracle Worker,’ with Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. I remember all of us watching the movie together and we were completely riveted to the screen. When the movie ended, we all cried - together,” says Petri.
Television became a much needed escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. “I have an encyclopedic knowledge of television,” Petri offers. It was television that inspired him to cultivate his own talents for telling jokes, impersonations of famous people and singing.
But more than this, television provided him a strong sense of black pride. Petri states, “When Diahann Carroll came on TV as Julia, she was a proud and unapologetic black woman who was a single parent and I could totally relate. Flip Wilson had the highest rated TV show for two years. He not only had black guests on his show, but white guests too. Flip produced his own show with his own production company. The pride you felt from being able to watch black people emerge from the darkness and into the light in Hollywood. Being able to look upon these figures and to just be able to see these images with pride, it made the hard times we were living a little bit easier to take.”
It was television that allowed him to dream of a life outside of his neighborhood. “I knew that I could aspire to be that, one of them, or to be a judge, a doctor or a firefighter. There is not anything that is not open to me,” says Petri.
In school, pride for his community was further strengthened by the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Thurgood Marshall to amend “America’s contract,” and the writings of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka. Petri continued his education, becoming the first in his family to graduate college.
Petri Hawkins Byrd has a powerful vision for his beloved community. As the National Chairman of the O.K. Program, he is currently working with Tommy Davidson to produce a documentary film about the O.K. Program.
For more info, please visit www.okprogram.org.