Crystal Lee Sutton, union organizer who inspired Oscar-winning film Norma Rae, dies at 68

Crystal Lee Sutton, a fierce union activist and defender of working people whose own story inspired the Oscar award-winning film Norma Rae died September 11 at age 68 from brain cancer. Sutton was the daughter and granddaughter of textile workers and was herself a "lint head" working in a factory in North Carolina.

In 1973, a mother of three, earning $2.65 an hour and fed up with the working conditions, Sutton joined the Textile Workers Union of America and became an organizer in her factory. On the day she was fired, Sutton returned to the floor and wrote the word "UNION" on a piece of cardboard. In a moment famously recreated in Norma Rae, Sutton silently displayed the makeshift placard to all the workers on the floor before taken, kicking and screaming, to jail.

Sutton's courage reinvigorated the organizing campaign at J.P. Stevens, and in 1980 the textile giant signed a contract with the union. "It is not necessary I be remembered as anything," she told the Burlington paper in 2008, "but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the US and the world."

To read the original article, click here.
This site may require registration.