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News articles on the life and death of Crystal Lee Sutton
Crystal Lee - Tough as Steel - Boston Globe, January 28, 1980
CRYSTAL LEE - TOUGH AS STEEL - Boston Globe, January 28, 1980
The interview seems like a page ripped out of a Hollywood script – except it's real.
Crystal Lee Sutton, the rotund, rough-and-tumble labor organizer who is the real "Norma Rae" of the hit movie of the same name, is sipping Perrier for the first time. "It's just water they sell in bottles!" she says. It is crystal clear that Crystal Lee, the union organizer who has had three husbands and, by her own admission a string of lovers, is a woman who leans to plain talk. She has been called, among other things, a troublemaker - which some people think is putting it mildly.
"How do you see yourself?"
"I'm a woman. Not a lady. A woman," she answers softly, sexily, saucily. "A lady has an attitude," she says, shaking her head slightly, raising her pug nose ever so slightly. "It's look but don't touch.' Welllll," she continues, an exclamation point in her voice, "I figure that what a man can do, a woman can do. And it shouldn't make her less respectable."
Crystal Lee Sutton has her three children living with her - including an illegitimate son whose father she says is now a bank president. "Everyone has skeletons in their closets," she says, laughing. "That son is special to me," she adds, not laughing.
"Some people have called you trash. Surely you've heard that. Surely you've seen it in print."
Crystal Lee Sutton's hair hasn't been cut in 15 years and she's sitting on it. Her hands are stubby and strong. They've folded zillions of towels at the J.P. Stevens Co. in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., the place where, on May 30, 1973, she was dragged, screaming, by the town's chief of police from her job to jail.
What got her in this big trouble? She attempted to copy an antiunion company memo posted on the bulletin board. She considered it racist and wanted it exposed. Then, despite warnings from her supervisors, she got up on a table, exactly the way Sally Field does in the movie, holding up a quickly scribbled sign: "Union."
This is the woman facing the "trash" question now.
"Yessss," she says, dawdling over the word. "I've been called trash. Textile workers are looked down upon by the upper class. We're all just there to do laborers' jobs. They don't care . . . you have nothing and they have everything. When I went to school," she says, and here her eyes are Siamese cat gray and mysterious, "the other kids, the rich ones, wouldn't speak to us."
Then she is jerked from memories of past injury back to the interview, to the moment, to the question.
"It's the same today," she says with white hot anger simmering in the back of her brain.
And that is the point of Crystal Lee Sutton's crusade. Change. Big, big change. She is determined to get the textile workers at J. P. Stevens (the second largest textile manufacturer in the United States) a union contract which, to this day, they don't have.
"Look," she says with a formidable finality studding her voice and making her drawl more pronounced by the passion charging it, "they'll have to kill me to shut me up." She bursts into a sardonic laugh. "It's as simple as that."
To understand Crystal Lee Sutton's iron stance, you've got to understand her background and the justifiable belligerence that it fanned. You get the picture in bits and pieces out of the kaleidoscope of the interview itself. Crystal Lee Sutton is clearly ambitious. She's a fighter whom some people equate with Joan of Arc. And she has a cause defined by the enormously successful "Norma Rae" movie which is, after all, apparently based on the story of her life.
She says things, all kinds of things, that hint at how profoundly her discontent is seeded, how it takes root and tilts the scheme of a person's life.
She talks of her father, a loom fixer and her mother who was a weaver. No mill family could exist on one salary. You begin to see how her destiny seemed fixed and how her resentment built to the exploding point.
"He tried, God how my daddy tried! All of his troubles, all our troubles emanated from his job. He had terrible hearing problems because, at the mill, you have to scream to talk ordinary. And he had terrible breathing problems. You ever heard of the brown lung disease?"
The disease is caused by breathing cotton dust. An aunt of hers worked for 49 years in a mill, has brown lung disease and is getting a pension of $27 a month.
"Daddy always had a haggard look. It was a permanent depression." She folds her hands in her lap, looking down at them, composing herself for the next words:
"It made me upset," she understates.
Her eyes mirror the old aches.
"As far back as first grade," she muses, "I felt shunned. You wouldn't think that children could set up social barriers. But they do. The rich kids were told not to have anything to do with the laborers' kids. And they could always tell us by the way we were dressed . . .."
There are no tears in Crystal Lee Sutton's eyes. They aren't even moist. But they are profoundly sad. She is spilling gut emotions but she is a woman who has come to grips with her bitterest memories. She's a walking symbol of the motto, "Don't get mad, get even."
"And," she continues in a sing-song tone born of studied self- control, "their kids were always the cheerleaders. Their kids were always in the band. Rich kids were everything. The poor kids were nothing. And," she says slowly, emphatically, "they could do nothing."
She says that when she was in high school she wanted to be a cheerleader so much that it hurt. She actually had a knot of pain somewhere deep inside. Why didn't she try out to be a cheerleader? She laughs. "Because," she says, treating the question as if it were absurd, "my parents didn't have money for a cheerleading outfit. It all had to do with the dollar bill . . ."
As her life unfolded, it turns out that the $1 bill is as big an issue as a J. P. Stevens contract. Apparently she "misunderstood" the details of the movie contract and she signed a $1 release. That means that the "Norma Rae" movie, which reportedly grossed $8 million in its first six weeks, has brought Crystal Lee Sutton nothing but fame. A lawsuit is pending but she refuses to discuss any of the details. "I have no comment," she says, clamming up. "None."
There's a third dimension to Crystal Lee Sutton.
She's a celebrity of sorts.
She has two publicity agents with her, one who is present at the interview. Before the interview, this journalist received a telephone callfrom Sutton's publicist wanting to know, among other things, what would be asked. The publicist was advised that the questions would be extemporaneous, not prearranged. Crystal Lee Sutton's expenses are paid by the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union. She is lecturing at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and UCLA. There are television bookings and press interviews.
The fame is building. And it's due, in part, to the movie.
Has she ever met Sally Field?
"No. She's just an actress," she says. "She portrayed me well but I wish they had cast an unknown actress - someone who wasn't known for being Burt Reynolds' girlfriend."
Could she have played herself on screen?
"You can play a part only once," she says wryly
. She is reminded that she wields a certain personal power, one that has nothing to do with wealth. She says her outer strength comes from an inner faith.
"There's a lot of strength in the human being who allies himself or herself with God. One thing in life you've got to accept is that you're going to die. So therefore people can't really hurt you. When you think in terms of death, there's nothing to be afraid of," she says.
Crystal Lee Sutton has a temper. The first sign that she's angry, terribly angry, is the song she sings. "I wish I were a teddy bear . . ." She hums the tune softly, looking deadly calm. That is the real Crystal Lee Sutton, a woman who is angry but is singing. She is, as she said in the beginning, a woman. She won't be made over. She is who she is.
"I don't have to please anybody," she says. "People have to take me as I am. Listen," she says, giggling, "my husband says I look the same when I go to bed as when I get up in the morning."
Copyright Boston Globe. Read the article on NC Live here.
The world knows her as Norma Rae, the feisty textile mill worker who stood up to union-busting management and inspired the 1979 movie of that name starring Sally Field.
But her real name is Crystal Lee Sutton, and she came to Milwaukee on Monday with a simple message: Get out and vote.
Sutton, now 55, is a six-time grandmother who delights in talking about her family. Age hasn't dampened her passion for the rights of American workers. She is as lively as ever.
"I love the working class poor," she said. Sutton's LaborFest talk in Milwaukee was sponsored by the Milwaukee County Labor Council. She appeared several hours before President Clinton's speech.
While she is not happy with all of Clinton's politics in particular his signing of the welfare reform bill Sutton is supporting Clinton. "He's all we've got going right now," she said. "I hope that in his second term he can straighten out what he just did (on welfare reform) because if he didn't, we're in a hell of mess."
She plans to work to strengthen the Labor Party in her home state of North Carolina. About why that movie wasn't called "Crystal Lee": Sutton wouldn't give the film company permission because she didn't want people to think that she was taking all the credit for bringing in the union at her company when there were 3,000 workers voting for it.
That is typical of Sutton who has bucked convention and spoken her mind all of her life. And it has gotten her in trouble with her father, her husband and her bosses.
"When I was little they used to call me a tomboy 'cause I liked to play with my brother and all of his friends," she said. "Hell, I was just liberated."
Still, she said, she never doubted herself. And she was never scared of the consequences. "I can't stand injustice, and when I see it, I have to fight it," she said. "It's just something I have to do. That's how God made me."
Sutton said the labor movement had a lot of work left to do. There are a lot of Norma Raes out there working in unsafe conditions for wages that are too low, she said.
To them, she offers this advice: "Don't let nothing get you down."
Copyright Journal Sentinel Inc. Read the article on NC Live here.
The ‘real Norma Rae’ donates her papers – Burlington Times-News, June 13, 2007
"Somebody better do something about it," Sutton said after a dedication in her honor at Alamance Community College. The Burlington resident told a large group of students, family and friends that she might still have a role in the battle for the poor, God willing, but she is recovering from a brain tumor she had removed in January.
Sutton, an alumna of the nursing assistant program, has donated her papers to ACC in hopes that those who read them "will come up with a plan, an idea that will change things for the better." "I knew this union was the only way we could have our own voice, making ourselves a better way of life," Sutton told her audience. "This is like a dream to me. Never in a million years did I think I'd ever get through high school, let alone walk through a college door." Sutton is often called the "real Norma Rae," since her battles to bring a union to J.P. Stevens were portrayed by Sally Field in the award-winning 1979 film "Norma Rae." In its most famous scene, Norma Rae is fired for copying down a letter telling employees not to vote for the union. Declining to leave the Roanoke Rapids plant, she stands on her worktable hoisting a sign that says, "UNION," and every worker shuts down his or her machine in solidarity.
That's how it really happened, and Sutton was arrested for her audacity.
The movie earned Field an Oscar, but it also put Sutton in the spotlight. She worked for the Textile Workers Union of America, touring 19 cities, making numerous TV appearances, and becoming the subject of a documentary along with feminist activist Gloria Steinem. The two became friends, and Steinem sent greetings to her Tuesday at ACC.
"You do and always will inspire me," Steinem wrote.
Sutton said it has been hard to let go of the photographs and the fan letters that came her way in the 1980s. She has since withdrawn from public life, but it was an exciting time in union organizing and a challenge she did not shy from.
Her close friend from those union days, Richard Koritz, said the two even traveled to the Soviet Union during Reagan's presidency to support a textiles union there.
"It was kind of a heated moment," he said.
ACC President Martin Nadelman noted that Sutton's willingness to stand up for what she believed in made her the hero of the working class and the enemy of management.
"Crystal Lee Sutton did not set out in life to become an activist," Nadelman said. "She chose to right what she saw was wrong, and in doing such she made history, and in doing such she lost her job." "I know that my Bible says that God is always going to look out for the poor," Sutton said. "We'll see what God has in store for myself and everybody in this room and the rest of the United States."
Copyright Freedom Communications, Inc. Read the article on NC Live here.
Crystal Lee Sutton, 68, The Real-Life ‘Norma Rae’ – New York Times, September 15, 2009
The cause was brain cancer, her son Jay Jordan said.
Ms. Sutton (then Crystal Lee Jordan) was a 33-year-old mother of three earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the J. P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., when she took her stand. Low pay and poor working conditions had impelled her to take a leading role in efforts to unionize the plant. She was met with threats, she said.
"Management and others treated me as if I had leprosy," she later said in an interview for Alamance Community College, in Graham, N.C., which she attended in the 1980s.
After months trying to organize co-workers, Ms. Sutton was fired. When the police, summoned by the management, came to take her away, she made one last act of defiance.
"I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word 'union' on it in big letters, got up on my worktable, and slowly turned it around," she said in the interview. "The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet."
Within a year, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union had won the right to represent 3,000 employees at seven plants in Roanoke Rapids, including J. P. Stevens, which was then the second-largest textile manufacturer in the country.
In 1977, a court ordered that Ms. Sutton be rehired and receive back wages. She returned to work for two days, then quit and went to work as an organizer for the union.
For legal reasons, Ms. Sutton's name was not used in the 1979 movie "Norma Rae," for which Sally Field won the Oscar for best actress, a Golden Globe and the best-actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, all in 1980.
Bruce Raynor, who is now president of Workers United and executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, worked with Ms. Sutton in her organizing career.
In a statement on Monday, he said, "The fact that Crystal was a woman in the '70s, leading a struggle of thousands of other textile workers against very powerful, virulently anti-union mill companies, inspired a whole generation of people -- of women workers, workers of color and white workers."
Crystal Lee Pulley was born in Roanoke Rapids on Dec. 31, 1940, a daughter of Albert and Odell Blythe Pulley. Both her parents worked in the mills and, starting in her late teens, so did she.
Ms. Sutton's first marriage, to Larry Jordan Jr., ended in divorce. Besides her son Jay, she is survived by her husband of 32 years, Lewis Sutton Jr.; two daughters, Elizabeth Watts and Renee Jordan; two other sons, Mark Jordan and Eric Sutton; two sisters, Geraldine Greeson and Syretha Medlin; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
After more than a decade as a union organizer, Ms. Sutton earned certification as a nursing assistant from Alamance Community College in 1988. In later years, she ran a day care center in her home.
Jay Jordan said his mother kept a photograph of Ms. Field, in the climactic scene from "Norma Rae," on her living room wall.
Copyright New York Times Company. Read the article on NC Live here.
Labor Organizer Was Inspiration for ‘Norma Rae’ – The Washington Post, September 16, 2009
Ms. Sutton, a 33-year-old mother of three who earned $2.65 per hour folding towels at the J.P. Stevens textile plant, was fired in 1973 for her pro-union activity. Before the police hauled her off the factory floor, the 16-year veteran of the job wrote "UNION" on a piece of cardboard, climbed on to a table and slowly rotated so her fellow workers could see her protest.
Her colleagues responded by shutting down their machines, in defiance of management orders. Actress Sally Field won the Academy Award for best actress playing a more glamorous version of Ms. Sutton in the 1979 movie "Norma Rae." Ms. Sutton, who kept a photo of the penultimate scene in her living room, laughed at other parts of the movie, particularly when Norma Rae goes skinny-dipping with the actor portraying an outside labor union activist.
"Isn't it a shame that we didn't have that much fun?" she asked the real-life labor organizer, Eli Zivkovich.
Bruce Raynor, president of Workers United and executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, worked with Ms. Sutton to organize plants owned by Stevens, then the country's second-largest textile manufacturer. In 1974, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union won the right to represent 3,000 employees at seven Roanoke Rapids plants owned by Stevens in northeastern North Carolina.
"Our nation lost a great hero and champion of working people," he said in a statement. "Crystal Lee Sutton was a courageous woman who stood up for herself and her coworkers under the most difficult circumstances. She . . . is an inspiration to every worker who holds out hope and is prepared to fight for justice and respect at work."
Crystal Lee Pulley was born in Roanoke Rapids on Dec. 31, 1940, and started working at the age of 16. She had her first child at 19, was widowed at 20 and had a second child at 21. Her third child was born when she was 24. She made her own clothes and kept her own house clean, and that $2.65-an-hour job folding towels into gift boxes was the best one she ever had.
"My family had worked in textiles all my life. And my husband [Larry "Cookie" Jordan] worked at a unionized plant [a paper mill] and he had so much better benefits. He had four weeks paid vacation and my parents had one week paid vacation after 30 years," she told The Washington Post. "So I thought if the union had done that much for him, I wanted to have the same thing."
She went to a union meeting and became an activist. "Management and others treated me as if I had leprosy," she told Alamance Community College in Graham, N.C., where she donated her papers. "When I went in the plant with my union pin, you would have thought I had the plague and that is when the trouble started. It was truly different because a woman had never done or dared to do such stuff."
Author Hank Leiferman told her story in the 1975 book "Crystal Lee, A Woman of Inheritance."
After being fired from J.P. Stevens, Ms. Sutton got a job in a fast-food fried chicken joint in a nearby town. After she was reinstated by a court order in 1977, winning back wages of $13,436, she went back for two days "just to prove a point" before she quit. The textile workers union hired her as a spokeswoman and organizer, a job she held for a decade. Ms. Sutton earned certification as a nursing assistant from Alamance Community College in 1988. In later years, she ran a day-care center in her home.
Her marriage to Jordan ended in divorce.
Survivors include her husband of 30 years, Lewis Preston Sutton Jr. of Burlington, N.C.; five children; two sisters; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Copyright The Washington Post Company. Read the article on NC Live here.
The Organizer, A mill girl rebels – New York Times Magazine, December 27, 2009
Crystal Lee Sutton was an 11th grader in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., when she got her first job at J. P. Stevens & Company on the 4-to-midnight shift, feeding shuttles of yarn into fast-paced looms. She had other dreams. She wanted to join the Army, move beyond Roanoke Rapids, travel the world. But she was born a mill girl in a town with seven mills owned by one company, where her grandparents, her mother and her father all worked. J. P. Stevens also owned every shotgun house in Sutton's neighborhood. The high-school curriculum included courses on how to be a weaver and a loom fixer. Mill life felt inevitable, like a genetic trait passed down generation to generation.
Fighting fate requires courage. In Sutton's case, restlessness helped, too. When the Textile Workers Union of America showed up in Roanoke Rapids, Sutton (at the time, her married name was Jordan) was a 32-year-old mother of three on her second marriage. (Her first husband was killed in a car accident when she was just 20 years old with a 4-month-old son.) She had tried being a homemaker; it bored her. And her new job folding hand towels in the mill wasn't all that much better.
As she would tell Henry P. Leifermann, the author of "Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance," around the time she saw a union poster hanging in the mill in 1973, she had been thinking about the paltry wages, the bone-tiring work and the stingy benefits that she and her parents had suffered. She wanted something better for her children.
The day after she went to her first union meeting, held in a black church where Sutton was one of only two whites attending, Sutton wore a five-inch-wide red-and-white button to work that declared, "I'm for TWUA." In the mill she carried a book called "What the Company Will Do for You." Inside, the pages were blank. She held union meetings in her house. She talked union with mill hands before and after work and during her 20-minute breaks. Eli Zivkovich, who was sent by the TWUA to organize Roanoke Rapids, would later say that in his 20 years as an organizer he had never known anyone who matched Sutton's zeal.
Not all of Roanoke Rapids was impressed. She was called a whore and treated like a pariah. Southern textile workers had a long history of resisting labor organizing. They had been fed anti-union rhetoric since childhood - from the pulpit and in the classroom. The union would be a tool for black power; a union victory would shut down every mill. When you are poor and desperate, a bad job is better than no job.
Unless you were Crystal Lee Sutton. On a humid afternoon in May 1973, Zivkovich asked Sutton to copy an anti-union letter posted on mill bulletin boards that claimed, among other things, that blacks would run the union. Supervisors had warned workers not to copy information from the bulletin boards. But they also must have been eager for an excuse to get rid of Sutton.
During a work break that night, Sutton took her clipboard and stood in front of a bulletin board. Soon two supervisors were behind her, and then a third. They told Sutton to stop writing, but she kept at it. When the general supervisor said he would fire her and call the police, Sutton continued until she was done. Then she tucked the papers into her bra.
The police were, indeed, on their way. As Sutton walked to her worktable, she saw a police officer coming across the work floor. Knowing she had only minutes left, Sutton grabbed a black magic marker and a piece of stiff cardboard. In big block letters she wrote the word UNION. Then she hoisted herself onto her worktable and held the sign above her head with both hands. Slowly, she turned around so that the entire room, filled with side hemmers and terry cutters, could see. Dozens of mill hands stopped working and watched her. Several gave her the V sign, for victory. Others held their fists in the air. (Years later, Sally Field re-enacted that moment in what became an iconic scene in "Norma Rae," which was inspired by Sutton's life.)
Still, it would be another year before the union won the right to represent the workers. And another seven years before J.P. Stevens signed a union contract for 3,000 workers in Roanoke Rapids. That 1980 contract raised mill workers' pay to $5 an hour on average and created safety and health policies, as well as seniority rules. And though Sutton alone was not responsible for the union's success, her determination that night in May 1973 had invigorated the fight.
Sutton spent the next years in several low-wage jobs - at a fastfood chicken restaurant, as a hotel maid. In the early '80s, she traveled all over the country as a spokeswoman for the union. But the most meaningful work was always closer to home. In the months after she was fired from J.P. Stevens, she finally became the woman she wanted to be, she said. Day after day she stood outside of the mills with other supporters, handing out leaflets and union buttons. As workers filed past her into the mill, she was dressed in jeans and a TWUA sweatshirt, her long brown hair flowing behind her. "Hey, please sign that union card," she would say in a Southern cadence both honeyed and firm. "I'm going to be here until you sign that card."
Copyright New York Times Company. Read the article on NC Live here.