Leon Walter Tillage (January 19, 1936 – October 5, 2011) was an African American whose autobiographical children's book Leon's Story (1997) features the effects of Jim Crow laws on the lives of African Americans during the 1930s and 1940s – and of the later Civil Rights Movement.
Tillage was a sharecropper's son in small-town North Carolina during the "Jim Crow" era of racial segregation. He worked as a custodian at Park School of Baltimore for more than 30 years beginning in 1967. Tillage's father got run over by a car and died because of some drunk teenagers which made his family fall into debt and his mother had to run the household on her own. Leon's Story is an oral history based on interviews of Tillage by Susan L. Roth, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1997; it won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 1998.
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