Leon's Story

"Leon's Story is a powerful, wonderful thing!" -- Nikki Giovanni I remember that as a young boy I used to look in the mirror and I would curse my color, my blackness. But in those days they didn't call you "black." They didnt say "minority." They called us "colored" or "nigger." Leon Tillage grew up the son of a sharecropper in a small town in North Carolina. Told in vignettes, this is his story about walking four miles to the school for black children, and watching a school bus full of white children go past. It's about his being forced to sit in the balcony at the movie theater, hiding all night when the Klansmen came riding, and worse. Much worse. But it is also the story of a strong family and the love that bound them together. And, finally, it's about working to change an oppressive existence by joining the civil rights movement. Edited from recorded interviews conducted by Susan L. Roth, Leon's story will stay with readers long after they have finished his powerful account.

Leon Walter Tillage lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he has worked for thirty years as a custodian at The Park School.

Susan L. Roth's many picture books include Ishi's Tale of Lizard, which was an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists. She lives in Great Neck, New York.

"In this riveting autobiography, Baltimore janitor Leon Walter Tillage reflects on his life with all the vitality of a storyteller gathering his audience around him. He recalls his childhood as an African American sharecropper's son in 1940s North Carolina...Tillage's words describe a time, only a few short decades back, when Klansmen and Jim Crow laws ruled the South...Roth's dramatic black-and-white collages pay homage to the power of Leon's story, a tale that does more in its gentle way to explose the horrors of racism than most works of fiction ever could.""-Starred, Publishers Weekly

"The story has great power."-The New York Times Book Review

"The incidents described in his moving personal narrative are transcribed from taped oral testimony...The full strength of character of Leon Tillage and those he represents is revealed in the plain dignity of his words." - Starred, The Horn Book