LeVar Burton's parents divorced when he was 11 years old and he was raised by a single mother. He began his episode of “Finding Your Roots” with lots of questions about his family, but the host and producer of “Reading Rainbow” wasn't prepared for the answers he was given.
“Finding Your Roots” host Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. started with the maternal side of Burton's family tree and discovered that his great-great-grandfather was a white man named James Henry Dixon.
“I would have fought you five minutes ago if you had told me I had a white great-great-grandfather,” Burton told Gates Jr. The news was shocking for the actor, whose breakout role was playing slave Kunta Kinte , doing almost anything for freedom, in the record-breaking miniseries Roots. “What?! Kunta has white ancestry. What?! Come on, Skip!” said Burton.
It gets even more confusing. James Henry Dixon was born in 1847 and served in the North Carolina Confederate Junior Reserves. The Finding Your Roots research team does not believe the then 14-year-old experienced combat, but he did fight to maintain slavery. He subsequently fathered a child with a black woman born into slavery, and the conditions surrounding the birth of Burton's great-grandmother are unknown.
“I often wonder what the white men of this time are and how they justify to themselves their relationships with black women, especially those with unbalanced power dynamics,” Buton reflected during the episode. “There needs to be a strong emotional and mental separation. So in my opinion it's possible that he thought about it and became conflicted at worst, perhaps remorseful at best. Then there's a chance he didn't think about it at all.”
It was a lot of information for Burton, but the beloved host quickly began thinking about how this new information could help him better connect with the people around him. According to the study “Finding Your Roots,” James Henry Dixon had nine children and over 40 grandchildren, giving Burton “an extensive network of white cousins.”
“This is incredibly surprising… There's a conflict raging inside me right now, but it's also – strangely enough, I feel a path opening up,” Burton explained. “…I think we need to have this conversation about who we are and how we got here. I see that we [as a society] are so polarized politically, emotionally and racially. We don't talk to each other. So I looked for an entry point to speak to white America. Here it is.”
The revelation of his maternal parentage was shocking, but Burton received equally corroborating information about his estranged father's parentage. At the beginning of the episode, Burton said that Reading Rainbow is the work he is most proud of because education is so important to him and his mother. It turned out that he had also inherited this drive to teach from his father. Burton's grandfather Aaron and great-grandfather Pearl were both school principals in Arkansas.
Pearl opened a school for colored children in Arkansas in the late 19th century. It was at a time when over 20 percent of the black population in the state was illiterate.
“It gives me great pride that I have very honestly inherited this mantle of educator,” Burton said, breaking down in tears at the revelation. “I had no idea… I'm thrilled. I can't even explain how it feels to get this information. It's like parts of me are missing. They’ve always been out there somewhere.”
Burton's family history became even more surreal as the episode progressed. He also learned that Pearl's father, Hal, who was known as a womanizer, became a member of the Arkansas State Assembly in 1886. “He was one of those Negro politicians during Reconstruction,” Burton recounted in awe as he was shown Hal’s voting papers. “Despite his infidelity, he was popular enough to be elected to public office.”
“Black people, we don’t share family histories. We are really hesitant. I couldn't get any information out of my mother. “She was always so insistent that we didn’t know about the trials and tribulations she went through,” Burton continued, reflecting on what he learned during the program. “She tried to protect us, but it leaves us in the dark about who we are. This information is stuff we need to feel whole… This will resonate for a while. It’s so powerful.”
Burton was extremely touched by the entire episode and told Gates Jr. that the experience had a profound effect on him.
“Never in a million years would I have thought that information like this would be found about my family. “It’s overwhelming,” Burton admitted. “I knew nothing about myself until today. This information changed me. She changed me. It changes the way I see myself. It changes my relationship with my family. I have changed forever.”
Finding Your Roots Season 10 continues Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS.