Dick and Jane and Levar

The first time I saw actor/director Levar Burton, to the best of my knowledge, was 1977, when he played Kunta Kinte in Roots.

“If you’re a Star Trek fan, you know LeVar Burton as Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge, the vision-impaired engineer of the USS Enterprise. Fans of ’70’s mini-series know him as Kunta Kinte, Alex Haley’s ancestor kidnapped into slavery from Roots. If you’re a parent or a teacher, the first thing you think of when you hear Burton’s name is not Star Trek: The Next Generation, but Reading Rainbow.”

I remember quite distinctly the first time I saw Reading Rainbow. It was in my early days as a substitute teacher. It was an elementary class in either Chula Vista or National City — I worked for both districts. I set up the TV and the VCR, as the classroom teacher had left in her schedule. Every child settled down. As I started the videotape, they began singing in unison a song I had never heard before. “Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high.” I confess at the time, the show’s charm escaped me, but I was not the target audience. As I gained more teaching experience and especially after I became a mother, my appreciation of Reading Rainbow grew exponentially.

LeVar Burton, the host of Reading Rainbow as well as its executive producer, has long been a literacy advocate. He has just been named the inuagural Literacy Champion by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. He previously won the Inamori Ethics Prize for being a literacy advocate.

He introduced millions of children across North America to the best of modern children’s literature. When I was in grade school, Dick and Jane integrated in second grade. If I remember correctly, the parents and teachers made a bigger deal of that than the kids did. Our class was already integrated. LeVar Burton made sure that all his viewers saw children who “looked like them” and that they were exposed to children with different colored skin and hair.

Do you have any special memories of Reading Rainbow? Who else is a Literacy Champion?