LEVAR BURTON
A book could
take you somewhere.
LeVar Burton made reading feel like an invitation. His gift was making room for the person on the other side of the story.
By Rob Urban · Paper Boat Media
Updated September 28, 2026
AN APPETITE FOR STORIES
A book is not broccoli.
Adults sometimes sell reading to children the way we sell vegetables. It is good for you. It will help later. Please stop making that face.
LeVar Burton offered a more appealing proposition. A book could take you somewhere. You did not have to justify the trip with a test score.
That distinction sits near the center of a remarkable public life. Burton portrayed the young Kunta Kinte in Roots, welcomed children to Reading Rainbow, and played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The National Book Foundation identifies those roles alongside his work as a director and education advocate. They belong to different kinds of television, but each asks the audience to imagine a life beyond its immediate experience.
A BEGINNING AT NINETEEN
The person behind the welcome
LeVar Burton was studying theatre at the University of Southern California when he was cast as Kunta Kinte in Roots at nineteen. USC’s account of his career begins with that extraordinary early responsibility.
The young actor who would become a reassuring guide for children first became widely known through a story of enslavement, family and the struggle to retain identity. That beginning gives the familiar face a depth worth remembering.
In a 2024 conversation with NPR’s Rachel Martin, Burton remembered having to accept that Roots might be the most consequential work of his life. He was nineteen, with a whole career still ahead of him.
That is an unusual burden to put beside a beginning. Most young performers are hoping someone will notice. Burton had to imagine a future after being noticed on a scale few actors ever experience.
His later warmth feels richer to me with that history in view. The person inviting children into stories had already taken part in one that asked a nation to face something painful. Gentleness can come with depth.
That is one of the moral possibilities of storytelling. The viewer encounters a person with relationships, a name and a sense of self before encountering the social system trying to reduce that person to property. The sequence changes the act of attention.
Burton’s own account of This Is My Story, a project sharing personal experiences of Black life in America, returns to the capacity of storytelling to bring people closer to one another. The attention to individual lives continues.
READING RAINBOW
Children had opinions, too.
Reading Rainbow began in 1983. Burton hosted and produced the original program over twenty-three years. Its episodes connected featured picture books with visits, interviews and other explorations, while children offered their own book recommendations. The program’s history includes the contributions of Twila Liggett, Cecily and Larry Lancit, WNED and many other collaborators. Burton’s familiar presence carried the work of a much larger creative team.
The arrangement respected two things adults sometimes separate: a child’s interest in the world and a child’s interest in a story. A book did not have to be presented as a small sealed object whose only purpose was reading practice. It could become the beginning of a conversation with everything outside it.
That is a much more generous invitation than treating literature as nutritional supplementation. Children can detect the moment when adults have hidden an assignment inside something described as fun. The disguise is rarely as convincing as the adults think.
What I find distinctive about Burton’s presence is that he does not need to diminish himself to meet a child. Warmth need not mean a silly voice. Clarity need not mean empty language. An adult can speak intelligibly and still suggest there is more to discover.
The children’s recommendation segment adds something equally important. It lets children appear as readers with opinions, rather than only as recipients of an adult’s approved list. A child who says what they liked is doing a small piece of criticism. They are explaining why another person might care.
A child who recommends a book is doing something quite grown-up: noticing what another person might enjoy and finding words for why it matters. The program made room for that judgment. It treated children as participants in the life of books.
A learner needs reasons to want the skill. Reading Rainbow worked in that space between an ability and an appetite. It showed what reading might open.
GEORDI LA FORGE
A place in the future
Beginning with Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton played Geordi La Forge, initially the Enterprise’s helmsman and then its chief engineer. Geordi is blind and uses a fictional assistive device, the VISOR, to perceive his surroundings. The character’s expertise makes him central to the ship’s work.
I would be reluctant to board anything repaired using dialogue I remembered from a television episode. But the imagined technology gives the story a setting, and Geordi gives the audience a person to place inside that future.
Geordi’s competence is ordinary within the world of the series. Other characters need his judgment. He belongs in the professional conversation. That can matter in a way that an occasional speech about possibility does not.
Representation becomes richer when a character is allowed a full personality. A person can be intelligent, impatient, funny, uncertain or socially awkward. Geordi belongs in the professional conversation while remaining someone with a life beyond the problem he is solving.
Burton also faced a particular performance constraint: the VISOR covered his eyes. Much of an actor’s expressive vocabulary ordinarily lives there. A performance built around voice, posture and response has to carry information that another actor might communicate with a glance.
One Reading Rainbow episode made the connection between these worlds unusually concrete. Its discussion of The Bionic Bunny Show included a visit behind the scenes of The Next Generation. The familiar host could show how another familiar fiction was constructed.
That is a lovely use of access. Showing the machinery behind an imaginative world does not have to spoil the world. It can introduce the people and decisions that made it possible. A child may leave interested in acting, a camera, an effect, a costume or simply the possibility that stories are things people make.
LEVAR BURTON READS
Reading to the grown-ups
LeVar Burton Reads carried the reading invitation into short fiction for an older audience. His official podcast page describes selected stories paired with narration and sound design, including work by writers such as Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury and Haruki Murakami. It offers another medium for the encounter rather than requiring the audience to remain the age at which it first met him.
That progression interests me as a writer. Adults do not stop needing stories when nobody is assigning them. We may simply become very good at filling the available silence with other things. There is always another message, another errand and another small rectangle asking whether we have seen the latest disaster.
Listening to fiction creates a different demand. The voice supplies rhythm and emphasis, but the listener still has to imagine. A room, a gesture or an unfamiliar world takes shape without a production department drawing every edge on a screen.
A narrator therefore has a delicate job. Too little interpretation can leave the language flat. Too much can crowd out the listener. The performer must make choices while leaving space for the author’s sentences to do their own work.
It also keeps other writers visible. The point of a reading is not only that LeVar Burton is speaking. Someone wrote the story. Someone imagined the situation, shaped the language and decided what to leave unresolved. A good guide directs attention toward that work.
A LIFE BEYOND THE SCREEN
The voice belongs to a person.
In his conversation with Rachel Martin, Burton also described a change in how he understood success. Being constantly busy had given way to a more deliberate balance of work, rest and the use of his time.
I am glad there is room for that in the story. A reassuring public presence still belongs to a person with a finite amount of energy. The warmth that reaches an audience has a life behind it.
There is something moving about an adult who has spent so much time encouraging other people’s curiosity becoming more attentive to the conditions of his own life. The invitation to enjoy a story should have room for the storyteller, too.
His work belongs beside Mae Jemison’s refusal to separate imagination from intelligence. The future becomes more imaginable when somebody helps us see a place for ourselves and for other people inside it.
A book is not broccoli. A child’s curiosity is not a deficiency waiting for an adult to correct it.
LeVar Burton made room for the appetite. That is a considerable life’s work.
A FEW USEFUL DETAILS
About LeVar Burton
What is LeVar Burton known for?
LeVar Burton is an actor, director and literacy advocate known for playing Kunta Kinte in Roots, hosting and producing Reading Rainbow, and portraying Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
How long did LeVar Burton host Reading Rainbow?
The National Book Foundation credits Burton with twenty-three years as producer and host of the original Reading Rainbow series, which began in 1983.
What is LeVar Burton Reads?
LeVar Burton Reads is his short-fiction podcast, combining narration with sound design and featuring stories by writers including Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury and Haruki Murakami.
How did Reading Rainbow involve children?
Alongside featured books and explorations of the wider world, the original program included children offering their own book recommendations.