Uh oh! The Messenger, on Wednesday, January 17th., published this shocking headline, “‘Roots’ Actor LeVar Burton Shocked to Discover Confederate Great-Great Grandfather on ‘Finding Your Roots’”.
LeVar Burton’s parents divorced when he was 11 years old, and a single mother raised him. He came into his episode of Finding Your Roots with a lot of questions about his family, but the Reading Rainbow host and producer was not 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’d have fought you five minutes ago if you had told me that I had a white great-great-grandfather,” Burton told Gates Jr. The news was shocking for the actor, whose breakout role was playing Kunta Kinte, a slave willing to do almost anything for freedom, in the record-breaking miniseries Roots. “What?! Kunta got white ancestry. What?! Come on now, Skip!” Burton said.
It gets even more confounding. James Henry Dixon was born in 1847 and served in the North Carolina Confederate Junior Reserves. The Finding Your Roots research team doesn’t believe the-then-14-year-old saw combat, but he did fight to uphold slavery. He then went on to father a child with a Black woman born into slavery, and the conditions around the birth of Burton’s great-grandmother are unknown.
“Looks like a Whitey in the woodpile”, said National Director of the Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan, Thomas Robb. “I wonder how LeVar Burton views reparations now. Make no mistake, miscegenation is a sin, but it did happen. I’m sure this isn’t an isolated case where a black finds out they have White relatives in their family tree. I know some people dislike, and maybe even hate Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves, but here’s a fact that maybe some people don’t know. When Lincoln freed the slaves, he wanted them shipped back to their motherlands. He didn’t intend on allowing any of the non-whites to remain in America because he knew interbreeding would take place on a much larger scale once the blacks were free. Abraham Lincoln knew, as all of our forefathers, that White people interbreeding with negroes, or any other non-white races, is a sin. Alot of people will agree that homosexuality is a sin. Even some preachers that allow homosexuals into their church know that it’s wrong. The two biggest sins recorded in the Bible are homosexuality and miscegenation. Many don’t know, because it isn’t taught, that the reason Noah and his family were spared from the flood is because they were the only people left that hadn’t tainted their blood with non-whites. Many preachers know this, but they don’t teach it. My point is, many blacks crying for reparartions have White ancestors, so the idea of paying blacks because they were slaves is ridiculous. This case here shows that Mr. Burton had family that fought to keep slavery in America. What a surprize!”