LeVar Burton learns that he is part white with a Confederate ancestor

The “Reading Rainbow” vet appeared on a recent episode of PBS's “Finding Your Roots” — where the host Henry Louis Gates Jr He put together a LeVar family tree dating back centuries…and identified a white man from the 1800s as his great-grandfather.

Long story short, LB's great-grandmother on his mother's side – a woman named Mary Sells She listed her father as a black man named Louis Sales …But DNA tests show that this is not the case.

Instead, the data shows that her biological father was a Caucasian farmer from the South named James Henry Dixon — who actually fathered children with an unnamed black woman born into slavery. Even more surprising… Dixon had served in the Confederate Army as a teenager during the Civil War, so technically – he was an apologist for slavery at the time.

In response to this news, LeVar said he has mixed feelings… explaining, “There's some conflict going on inside me right now. But strangely enough, I feel like there's a path opening up.”

“Knowing what I know about the history of this nation, I wanted, especially in this current time frame, to think that we as Americans need to have this conversation about who we are and how we got here,” he added.