Question: The character played by LeVar Burton in "Roots" died in what year?

Context articles: Kunta Kinte
Jennifer Betit Yen
LeVar Burton
Roots: The Gift
Grambling's White Tiger
List of Reading Rainbow episodes
Geordi La Forge
Reach for Me
Rebop (TV series)
Roots (1977 miniseries)

Kunta Kinte ( 1750 – 1822; ) is a character in the novel "" by American author Alex Haley.
 Haley claimed that Kunta Kinte was based on one of his ancestors: a Gambian man who was born in 1750, enslaved and taken to America and who died in 1822.
 Haley said that his account of Kunta's life in "Roots" was a mixture of fact and fiction.
 The extent to which Kunta Kinte is based on fact is disputed.
Jennifer Betit Yen (born in New York City, New York and a citizen of the US and Ireland) is an actor, lawyer, producer, and writer.
 She has been the President of the Asian American Film Lab ("Film Lab"), a non-profit dedicated to the promotion of diversity in media, since 2012, and launched the Film Lab’s first production arm, AAFL TV.
 Her first screenplay, The Opposite of a Fairy Tale, about elder abuse, written with help from Aaron Woolfolk, received grant funding from the Ms. Foundation for Women.
 Her web series, La La Land, won an Accolade Award for Best TV Pilot in 2009.
 As an actor, Betit Yen has performed for East West Players, The Manhattan Theatre Source, which garnered her a "The New York Times" mention, and has been cast in Royal Pains (USA), the FX show, "Dirt and FOX’s "America’s Most Wanted" among others.
 She has also done a significant amount of voiceover work, including for Reading Rainbow with LeVar Burton and voicing the "sporty, bouncy and outspoken" character of "Avery" on the series "The Beacon Street Girls".
 Betit Yen writes the blog "Ethical is Beautiful.
 Be Beautiful" and founded MyJennyBook, a company creating personalized multimedia stories for children.
Levardis Robert Martyn "LeVar" Burton Jr. (born February 16, 1957) is an American actor, presenter, director and author.
 He is best known for his roles as the host of the long-running PBS children's series "Reading Rainbow", Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in "" and the young Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries "Roots".
 He has also directed a number of television episodes for various iterations of "Star Trek", among other programs.
Roots: The Gift is a 1988 television film.
 It is the third installment of the "Roots" series, which traces the maternal family history of African American author Alex Haley, starting with his fourth great-grandfather Kunta Kinte.
 The film premiered on ABC on 11 December 1988, with AT&T as the sole national sponsor for the broadcast.
 LeVar Burton and Louis Gossett Jr. reprise their respective roles of Kunta Kinte and Fiddler.
 The film takes place between the second and third episodes of the original "Roots" miniseries.
Grambling's White Tiger (also released as White Tiger in Europe) is a 1981 TV movie about the true story of Jim Gregory (played by Bruce Jenner) the first white quarterback at Grambling College, a historically black college in 1962.
 The movie covers Gregory's freshman year.
 Harry Belafonte stars as Coach Eddie Robinson and LeVar Burton (already famous from "Roots" and later to be known for "Reading Rainbow" and "") appears as Charles 'Tank' Smith, the first friend Jim Gregory makes on the team.
 The film is directed by Georg Stanford Brown.
This is the following episode list of "Reading Rainbow" hosted by longtime executive producer LeVar Burton.
 The show premiered on PBS on June 6, 1983.
 The final episode aired on November 10, 2006; re-runs ceased on August 28, 2009.
 On June 20, 2012, an app for the show was released.
Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge is a fictional character who appeared in all seven seasons of the American science fiction television series "" and its four feature films.
 Portrayed by LeVar Burton, he served as helmsman of the USS "Enterprise"-D in the , then occupied the role of the chief engineer for the rest of the series and in the films.
 La Forge has been blind since birth and uses technological devices that allow him to see - a VISOR in the series and the first film, replaced by ocular prosthetic implants in the last three films.
Reach for Me is a 2008 American comedy-drama film directed by Levar Burton.
 It won the AARP 'Movie's for Grownups' Breakthrough Accomplishment award in 2010.
Rebop is an American children's television series that aired from 1976 to 1979 on PBS stations and produced by WGBH Boston.
 The premise was to promote social understanding and diversity among young people.
 LeVar Burton hosted for the final season.
Roots is an American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel "".
 The series first aired on ABC-TV in January 1977.
 "Roots" received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won nine.
 It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award.
 It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which still holds a record as the third highest rated episode for any type of television series, and the second most watched overall series finale in U.S. television history.
 It was produced on a budget of $6.6 million.
 The series introduced LeVar Burton in the role of Kunta Kinte.