Help ‘Norma Rae’ fight cancer

Crystal Lee Sutton with Eli Zivkovich

AT THE AGE of 17, Crystal Lee Sutton started working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift at the J. P. Stevens cotton mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. 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. "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 the 1979 film Norma Rae, based on a book about Crystal Lee. In the film, her courageous stance inspired her fellow workers to vote for the union. Sally Field won an Academy Award for portraying this feisty union organizer.

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. The pressures ended her marriage. 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.”

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 studies classes to dramatize the difficulty of organizing under U.S. labor law.

Now Crystal Lee is battling meningioma, a usually benign cancer that, unfortunately for her, is life threatening. She has had two surgeries and is on chemo therapy. Her husband of 30 years, Lewis Sutton, Jr., is working two jobs to pay for her medical care.

A foundation has been set up to accept donations to help pay for her care. You can honor this woman who fought so hard for working families, and paid such a high price 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