*LeVar Burton received some startling news while tracing his family’s ancestry on the hit PBS series “Finding Your Roots.”
On the Jan. 16 episode, Burton learned that his great-great-grandmother on his mother’s side, Mary Sills, descended from a Confederate soldier. Burton knew Sills when he was a young boy. As Today.com reports, the show reveals that Sills thought the man who raised her was her biological father, but he wasn’t. Her father was a white farmer named James Henry Dixon.
“Were you expecting that? Did you have any idea you had a white ancestor?” host Henry Louis Gates asked Burton.
“No, no. I had no idea. So Granny was half white. Wow,” the actor said.
Burton was also shocked to learn that Dixon served in the Confederate Army as a teenager.
“Are you kidding me? Oh my God, oh my God. I did not see this coming,” Burton said. Watch the moment via the YouTube clip below.
“I often wonder about white men of the period and how they justify to themselves their relations with black women, especially those in an unbalanced power dynamic. There has to be a powerful disconnect created emotionally and mentally,” Burton said on the program.
“So it’s possible in my mind that he could’ve contemplated it and was conflicted at worst, maybe repentant at best. And then there’s the possibility that he didn’t think about it at all,” he continued.
“… and we’ll never know. They could’ve been in love, it could’ve been something terrible. We don’t know,” Gates replied.
When Gates asked Burton how it feels to discover this detail about his family’s ancestry, the “Reading Rainbow” host said, “There’s some conflict roiling inside of me right now, but also oddly enough I feel a pathway opening up.”
He added, “In this now moment, I believe that as Americans, we need to have this conversation about who we are and how we got here. But yet I see that we are so polarized politically and racially.”
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