Leo B. James was born on November 6, 1924 in Albany, Georgia. He was the seventh of ten children of Goldie and George James. His nickname was "lbj," which he acquired as a child, and it stuck.

Leo and his siblings all grew up in a small, rural Georgia community. His early years were spent picking cotton and following in the footsteps of his father, a sharecropper and Pentecostal preacher. In 1942, at the age of eighteen, LBJ enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin and began his political career.