LeVar Burton: 5 facts you may not have known

Last weekend, CBS Sunday Morning aired a wonderful profile of LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He also starred in the groundbreaking miniseries Roots (1977), and hosted PBS’ long-running Reading Rainbow.

If you haven’t yet seen the profile, I recommend it. For starters, the work Burton did as La Forge is well represented with scenes from “Booby Trap” and “The Enemy.”

But the profile also offers an absorbing look at the life and career LeVar Burton has led and leads outside of Star Trek.

Here are five facts from the piece you may not have known.

He originally wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest

At age 13, LeVar Burton entered St. Pius X Minor Seminary in Galt, California, having decided to pursue a vocation as a priest.

In a 2018 interview, Burton told The Atlantic he changed his goals because of his English teacher and drama coach Lee Bartlett:

"[H]e opened up my mind to ways of looking at the world that were separate from the Catholic point of view, and a lot of it made sense to me… So I decided that I needed to find some other focus for my life at the ripe old age of 17."

He won the role of Kunta Kinte in Roots on his first audition

Playing Kunta Kinte, the enslaved ancestor of Roots author Alex Haley, made LeVar Burton a celebrity. Impressively, Burton won that iconic role in an open call audition—his very first.

At the time, the fledgling actor didn’t even have an agent, as he told Adweek in a 2012 interview:

"The business had exhausted all the normal means of finding professional talent. They’d seen every young, black kid in L.A. who had an agent, and they were beating the bushes. My goal was to graduate with a BFA (a bachelor of fine arts majoring in drama) and move to New York and work on Broadway. I had no aspirations toward television or film work at all. I was a theater baby."

He views his literacy advocacy as a tribute to his mother

Erma Jean Christian Burton was an English teacher who also worked as a waitress to help fund his college education.

“I am the man I am because of the woman she was,” he told an audience at RootsTech’s African Heritage Day in 2017:

"My mom worked from nine to five, five days a week. But you see, Erma Jean is a most powerful human being, one of the most powerful I know. And she was determined that I would reach my full potential in life."

He hosts LeVar Burton Reads, a read-aloud short fiction podcast

In the CBS profile, you can see Burton recording an episode of his podcast, LeVar Burton Reads.

With 113 episodes available as of this writing, LeVar Burton Reads is exactly what its title would lead you to expect! As Burton says in each episode, the short stories he chooses to share have nothing in common but the fact that he loves them.

Burton doesn’t restrict his selections to science fiction and fantasy, but frequently chooses works from those genres, including many by women and authors of color.

Last September, Burton told NPR’s It’s Been a Minute his podcast harkens back, in part, to his childhood radio listening:

"I’m an Army brat, so we spent part of my childhood overseas. And the Armed Forces Radio Network at that time – we’re talking the mid-’60s, early to mid-’60s – they had a lot of theater of the mind programming on. I really wanted to give my audience that kind of an experience where you can really disappear. You can just disappear into story for a half hour or so and then go back to whatever it was you were doing before."

LeVar Burton Park is named after him

In 2019, Sacramento, California honored its famous son by renaming a park in his honor.

At the dedication, Burton joked:

"Who has parks named after them? Dead people, for the most part. I’m happy to say I am alive and kicking."

We’re happy too, LeVar… and hope we’ll see you in season two of Star Trek: Picard!