The Reading Warehouse

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's Story is the winner of the 1998 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction.

This is the first collaboration between Susan L. Roth and Nancy Patz. Susan has written and illustrated several books for children, including Hard Hat Area, Great Big Guinea Pigs, and My Love for You. She lives in New York City.