Kunta Kinte

Alex Haley dispro- proved that wrong by meticulously going through deeds, through, um, microfilm based on stories he had heard from his cousin, his great aunts when he was a little boy on the porch growing up in his boyhood home in Henning, Tennessee.

He heard his Grandma Cynthia talk about the, um, the great African, um, or the blacksmith, Chicken George, um, Kizzy, his mom, Kizzy being Kunta Kinte's daughter, these stories.

And he wondered, like, as he got older, you know, being a writer himself, how cool it would be or what a hoot it would be to trace based on these stories they told all the way back to Africa.

And you know, honestly, I think when Alex Haley was thinking about it, I don't really think he thought he could really do it.

But he started, he started, he started it, and I think as he found these like little bits of nuggets, like this like on the microfilm, he found his, you know, Grandma, uh, Cynthia or like going back to Reynolds, Virginia, where Kunta Kinte was a slave on certain plantations and then seeing the deed and, you know, and the property and how, you know, slaves were of course kept as property and then finding the name of his Grandma Cynthia when she was a, uh, born, you know? And I think that just kinda like intrigued him to continue, and he just kinda put these pieces together.

And it took him 12 years [chuckles] but he got it done.

And, and so you have Roots.

So rewatching it alongside reading your book was a great experience also, because it allowed it to be sort of really fresh in my mind.

And then they invited me, since it's the 50th anniversary, they're doing, um...

We started in Maryland on the docks where Kunta, Kunta Kinte's boat came in, the slave-

Wow

... ship came in.

No one's going to know you played in an all-star game that year because you were in the Super Bowl.

He was Kunta Kinte.

It's

true.

His mom was a social worker and educator and then moved to California as a kid where he was raised by his mom.

And he got into acting real young.

And his first credits are at age 20 as Kunta Kinte in 1977.

That was the big, that was the big, big role.

Yes, our reading rainbow LeVar Burton.

It says, tracing the different eras of his lives from Kunta Kinte to Georgie LaForge to reading rainbow and far beyond the camera, celebrated actor LeVar Burton fearlessly opens up about growing up during the civil rights movement.

being raised by a remarkable mother and discovering his calling as a storyteller.

He explores how acting has served as both a source of transformation and an escape for the most difficult parts of his past, while also confronting the challenges of being a parent, husband, and householder.