Yahoo Finance LeVar Burton Reflects on His Roots — and America's Path Forward: 'The Work Is Not Done'
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LeVar Burton was a sophomore at the University of Southern California when he won the role of Kunta Kinte, a young man from Gambia who is captured and sold into slavery. Less than a year later, he was on screens across the U.S. in Roots, one of the biggest TV events of all time.
The miniseries, based on Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, told the sweeping story of Kunta's horrific experience in Colonial America, encompassing generations of his descendants in the centuries to come. It aired across eight consecutive nights, beginning on Jan. 23, 1977.
Though Burton, now 64, acknowledges "ABC kind of backed into" Roots' success by choosing this scheduling strategy — which was highly unorthodox at the time — the end result was that Roots become a television juggernaut, an inflection point for American race relations and ultimately, a global cultural phenomenon.
"I continue to be surprised by the enduring popularity of Roots worldwide," Burton tells PEOPLE. "I've been to places on the globe like Suriname, where Kunta Kinte is a national hero and songs are literally written about him. Kunta Kinte is an international symbol of freedom and resistance, is something that I'm really, really proud of. And that's something that has certainly grown over time. I don't think I could be more proud."
Ahead of the miniseries' 45th anniversary, Burton spoke with PEOPLE about Roots. He shares his memories of stepping onto the set with a legendary ensemble cast, how Roots opened the door for his eclectic career and where he sees Roots fitting into today's social and political landscape all these years later.
PUTTING DOWN ROOTS
Burton filmed Roots in Savannah, Georgia, and Los Angeles in the spring and summer of 1976. While he says he experienced nerves during his audition, his first day on set "was more inspiring than it was intimidating."
"I felt like I knew who this kid was, so intimately well. That's all I focused on," he explains. "All I needed to do was play this part. And from the very first moment I read the first set of sides, I knew, I knew who Kunta was, inside and out. And that never wavered for me. Never."
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It didn't hurt, of course, that on his "very first day as a professional actor ... my very first scene, Cicely Tyson played my mother. Maya Angelou played my grandmother. I was in the presence of royalty."
"They treated me like a peer, a young peer, which was great for me because they all schooled me," he continues. "Everything I know about the professional work ethic of an actor, I learned on Roots from Lou Gossett, from Maya Angelou, from Cicely Tyson, from Moses Gunn, from Hari Rhodes, from Ji-Tu Cumbuka. I was the kid. They were the vets, and they took me under their wing."
Nearly three months later, after filming had wrapped, Burton says, "I did not want to let the character go. ... The experience was so enlivening for me. It's like I found my place in the world."
EMBRACING A PHENOMENON
Burton recalls the premiere — a trio of screenings of the first two hours of the miniseries in Washington, D.C. — as "very low-key by today's standards."
Though miniseries at the time typically aired one episode per week, he tells PEOPLE that ABC hedged its bets by choosing the eight-night timeline.
"They were very nervous about how the series would perform," he says. "If it failed, because nobody wanted to watch a show starring Black people as the heroes and white people as the villains, how would it play in Poughkeepsie?"
"And as it turned out, that was the decision that really changed the course of television history [when America got its first taste of binge-watching]," he adds.
RELATED: Inside Roots, the Searing 1977 Series That Started a National Conversation
Roots won nine of the 37 Emmys for which it was nominated and attracted an audience of more than 255 million, with its final night still standing as the second-most-watched finale in U.S. television history.
For Burton personally, the impact of Roots' unheralded success "came much quicker than I ever anticipated."
He emphasizes, "Again, I was a sophomore. My plan was to finish my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and move to New York and hustle my way on to the stage. Television and film acting were not in my plan."
Instead, he was now a household name — or at least a newly familiar face.
"There was a moment on the morning after night two," he recalls. "I was running an errand for my mom at the supermarket, and I got recognized for the first time. That was a trip."
READING THE ROOM
Once the series ended, Burton unexpectedly found himself positioned to be sort of a de facto cultural educator because he "had just seen a nation transformed by eight consecutive nights of television."
So, after five years of steady work as an actor, he was offered a new role in 1983 that "made perfect sense": Reading Rainbow.
"When I was presented a few years later with the idea of using the medium of television to steer children back in the direction of literature and the written word during the summer months, I thought, 'Yeah, that makes sense to me,'" he explains. "Reading Rainbow was a good idea, a good use of the television airwaves and a perfectly legitimate way for me to tell stories to perhaps the most important audience for all of us."
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RELATED: LeVar Burton Immortalized with Figurine Designed to Encourage Kids to Read
Roots and Reading Rainbow are just two of the roles for which Burton is stopped on the street. (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Community and his upcoming turn as the host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee are a few of his credits.) A throughline of education and representation runs across many of the projects he chooses.
And in a moment where America is grappling with fierce arguments over those very topics, including the culture clash surrounding Critical Race Theory, Burton tells PEOPLE, "I don't grapple at all. The work is not done. The beat goes on."
He affirms, "I do consider myself to be a social justice warrior. And as such, I am acutely aware that we are in the midst of an ongoing battle. America's ascendancy and her current moment, where she is teetering in the balance, has always been a journey of progress and retrenchment. So this is nothing new, is my point."
"We come here again and again, and I think each time we get the message out a little bit more. We are able to spread that sense of empathy," Burton continues. "However, at its very core, this has always been America. I'm of the generation that we're not ducking down. We're certainly not going away. This is our country as well. Our ancestors fought, bled, died ... That's why representation matters so much. Because this is a country that is made up of diverse stories. And to pretend that they aren't is really foolish."
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LEAVING A LEGACY
As evidenced by Burton's day-to-day schedule of hosting, directing and even podcasting LeVar Burton Reads, he's clearly not passing any torches any time soon. Still, as he approaches his 65th birthday, he says, "I have really embraced what I believe to be my role as an elder now, I think it's a good thing."
With the wisdom that accompanies his "elder" status, he's able to look back and see how Roots' role in U.S. culture — its impact on storytelling and shaping people's views of their fellow Americans — has evolved over nearly five decades.
"Even though it was really widely embraced — they used to show it every year on television and schools would show it as part of their history classes — I think the real work that Roots did took time," he says. "You can measure the viewership in the overnights, but you can't measure the depth to which people's hearts and minds got changed and then were able to pass that on to succeeding generations, in their own families."
As for his own Roots family, Burton admits it's been difficult to stay in touch with such a large ensemble over the years but to mark this milestone anniversary, he has a thought: "I wish we had a Roots group text. That would be awesome," he muses. "Maybe we'll start one. That's how we celebrate the 45th — start a Roots group chat."
