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by Harold Schlechtweg
Business Representative SEIU 513
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Sally Fields with Crystal Lee Sutton, the real “Norma Rae”
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I just learned Crystal Lee Sutton died in early September. She was the real "Norma Rae."
I worked with her in North Carolina in the late 1970s on an organizing project for the Textile Workers Union. She was someone who truly cared about her co-workers.
I had just moved to Greensboro from Louisville to work on the project directed by Pete Brandon. I only had what I could load in my car. She gave me
silverware, dishes and glasses.
She also loaned me her staff car so I could visit my uncle in South Carolina when I attended a
union conference in Spartansburg (at the time, the Textile Workers were employing her for public relations as the movie Norma Rae had come out not long before and the J.P. Stevens
boycott had just concluded successfully and they were focusing on Cannon Mills).
In 1979, Sally Field starred in Norma Rae, a movie based on the Sutton’s experiences
organizing at JP Stevens. Field won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.
North Carolina textile company JP Stevens was one of the most anti-union companies in
America. It bought up small unionized textile plants throughout the South just to shut them down. It mounted one of the most hostile union-busting efforts ever seen in post-war U.S. It was
found guilty of 122 unfair labor practice findings. It took a 10-year boycott and labor’s first corporate campaign, but , the 3,000 workers at JP Stevens eventually won their 17 year fight
with a strong contract.
The two things that upset Crystal about the movie was that she did not skinny dip with the union
organizer and he was middle-aged Serb from PA and not a young good looking Jewish guy from NY!
Most of the other stuff in the movie was true however. When they came to escort her out of the
plant she wrote Union=2 0in large letters on a piece of cardboard and got up on a table and all the workers shut down their machines in salute while they were taking her out.
Crystal wasn't your hard driving organizer type. She could have had a staff job as an organizer if
she was cut out for it but she wasn't. She was an excellent Organizing Committee member and shop leader and cared deeply for the people around her but she would have been
uncomfortable making the decisions that a union organizer sometimes has to make.
Over the years, I would get cards or notes from her because she would sometimes see me in
the 1199 News (when I was in West Virginia). I lost touch with her except to learn now that she has passed away. She was a true heroine of the working class.
In remembering this great labor hero, we should also pay attention to a tragedy of her death. When Sutton was diagnosed with brain cancer she went without possible life-saving
medications because the insurance wouldn’t cover it. "How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or
death," she said. "It is almost like, in a way, committing murder."
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