Leon Walter Tillage

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 1967. Leon's Story is an oral history based on interviews of Tillage by Susan L. Roth, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1997.