‘Norma Rae’ dies at 68

CRYSTAL LEE SUTTON, the former textile mill worker whose organizing efforts at the J. P. Stevens company inspired the Academy Award winning film “Norma Rae,” died at a hospice in Burlington, N.C., Sept. 11, 2009. She was 68.

Sally Field, who won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of Sutton, said in a statement, “Crystal Lee Sutton was a remarkable woman whose brave struggles have left a lasting impact on this country and without doubt, on me personally. Portraying Crystal Lee in ‘Norma Rae,’ however loosely based, not only elevated me as an actress, but as a human being.”

Sutton started working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift at the J. P. Stevens cotton mill in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. By the time she was 30, she was supporting three children on the $2.65 an hour she made working in miserable conditions. The mill was the biggest employer in the area, and the workers put up with a lot of abuse because they couldn’t afford to get fired.

Then Crystal Lee met Eli Zivkovich, a coal miner turned union organizer. He convinced her that the only way the workers would get better treatment from the company would be to form a union. She became his hardest working volunteer organizer in what would soon be one of the most famous union organizing campaigns in recent history.

"When I went in the plant with my union pin, you would have thought I had the plague," she told Burlington Times-News reporter Brie Handgraaf in 2008. "It was truly different because a woman had never done or dared to do such stuff."

When the company posted a racist flyer intended to scare workers off the union, Crystal Lee copied the words off it to use against them. But management caught her and fired her on the spot. That’s when she wrote “UNION” on a piece of cardboard and stood up on a work station so everyone in the factory could see it. All the workers shut down their machines to show their support, and the company had her arrested.

This action became the pivotal scene in “Norma Rae.”

But reality doesn’t tie up as neatly as films do. After Crystal Lee was arrested and fired, the workers voted the union in, but it took them another nine years to get a contract. In the meantime, Crystal Lee had trouble finding work. When “Norma Rae” came out, the woman the story was based on was pulling the fat off frozen chickens at a fast food stand — “The worst job I ever had,” Crystal Sutton would later say.

Eventually, she became a spokesperson for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), telling her inspiring story around the country. “Norma Rae” has been used in labor education classes to dramatize the difficulty of organizing under U.S. labor law.

In 2007, Sutton developed meningioma, a usually benign cancer that, unfortunately for her, was fatal. Her insurance first refused to pay for her treatment. Even after they relented and began paying, bills piled up, and her husband of 30 years had to take a second job to pay them.

International President Newton Jones learned of Sutton’s illness only a few days before her death, and the International Executive Council voted to make a donation to help her family with her medical bills. “I just could not let her die believing the union movement she worked hard for throughout her life had forgotten about her,” Jones said.

You can honor this real-life hero by sending a donation, however small, to show her that union workers still believe “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Crystal Lee Sutton Foundation
Truliant Federal Credit
P.O. Box 26000
Winston-Salem, NC 27114