LeVar Burton Is Doing a Live Q&A at UT Arlington and It's Sold Out

Oh. My. God.

The University of Texas at Arlington is hosting a live Q&A with LeVar Burton.

Yes, that LeVar Burton. The Roots miniseries' LeVar Burton. Reading Rainbow's LeVar Burton. Star Trek: The Next Generation's LeVar Burton.

UTA's Maverick Speaker Series has been making a big comeback since COVID slowed everything down and has scored a huge win by inviting Burton to a special hourlong Q&A with UTA President Dr. Jennifer Cowley at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 5, in Texas Hall.

Mark Lavelle, assistant vice president for alumni and donor engagement who oversees the Maverick Speaker Series, says the event is already sold out. The university launched a standby ticket option at UTATickets.com in case seats open up on the night of the event. Ticket holders must be at the Texas Hall by 7:20 p.m. or they risk losing their seat to a standby ticket holder, and the folks at UTA expect a long line of very patient fans on the night of the event.

"This is the first year that we reached out to [Burton's] people," Lavelle says. "He's been on our list of people for names under consideration. A couple of people heard him speak at other universities and when we put [Burton's name] in front of our students as possibilities, they were so enthusiastic. I can't tell you how many people have quoted that line he says from Reading Rainbow."

The line from Reading Rainbow, of course, is "And don't take my word for it" just before his long-running PBS show would cut to the segment where kids recommend their favorite books to the viewers.

If you've ever cared about literacy or pop culture at all in the last five decades, then you've heard of Burton. He's an actor, TV host, writer, literacy advocate and the man who plays the guy who kept the U.S.S. Enterprise's engines running so it could achieve warp speed.

He achieved mega-stardom in 1977 as Kunta Kinte in the blockbuster TV miniseries Roots. The miniseries is based on the acclaimed novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, which starts with the story of an 18th-century West African played by Burton who is captured by slave traders and transported to North America, where he's subjected to a dehumanizing and violent slave-based economy. The eight-episode miniseries follows the lineage of Kinte's ancestry through to the end of the Civil War in very stark and unflinching terms, in a way that no other television program or even films were willing to show.

Roots received widespread viewership and acclaim, winning eight Emmy Awards out of 43 nominations, including a nod to Burton for Outstanding Lead Actor for a Single Appearance. In 2016, the History Channel released a remake of the series with Burton as a co-executive producer. The success of Roots is considered to be one of the most pivotal moments in the medium of television and it sparked a nationwide awareness of America's original sin that dates back to its founding.

"I'm old enough to remember watching Roots," Lavelle says. "We only had five TV channels at the time, and the whole country was watching that show. It was a nationwide phenomenon. I visibly remember the impact that it had."  Burton is also remembered and beloved for playing Starfleet officer Geordi La Forge from 1987 to 1994 on TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation. Burton reprised the role in the third season of the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard, that follows the life of Capt. Jean Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart.

More recently, he was one of the guest hosts on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! and for a while was considered by many to be an ideal replacement for host Alex Trebek, who died in 2020 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He also appears on the Apple+ TV series The Problem With Jon Stewart, where he offers his satiric "MasterClass" on subjects such as the effects of globalization and the history of voting rights and wealth disparity. Here's a hint: "This all started with slave labor," Burton says in an episode of the show's first season.  
Burton was the host of the long-running, Peabody Award-winning PBS kids' show Reading Rainbow from 1983 to 2006 — a show  that inspired generations of kids to pick up books and actually read them. Burton mounted a successful Kickstarter in 2014 that relaunched Reading Rainbow for the digital age with the creation of the online kids' education portal Skybrary — which allows kids to read from a curated collection of thousands of e-books and interact with them through videos and other online ventures.

The event is the first big comeback for UTA's Maverick Speaker Series, and Lavelle says the university plans to announce two more events for the spring season soon.

"We're so glad that people want to come back to the theater for our 16th year of this speaker series," he adds.