Norma Rae Inspiration Dies

Crystal Lee Sutton, the workers' rights and union activist who inspired the Academy Award-winning movie Norma Rae, died yesterday of brain cancer. She was 68.

She was a 33 year old mother of 3 earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the J.P. Stevens textile manufacturing plant in North Carolina in 1973. "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." She was eventually fired for her organizing work.

Her final act of rebellion was enshrined in Norma Rae, played by Sallie Field - before cops ushered her out of the building, "“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... “The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet.”

In less than a year 3,000 workers were unionized at 7 plants, including J.P. Stevens, in NC. Ms. Sutton went on to work as a union organizer.

In the final years of her life, she battled with her insurance company to receive the necessary cancer medications. Ms. Sutton asks to be remembered as a fighter for the working poor, and hopes she'll inspire her children and grandchildren to take up the cause in her honor:

"Stand up for what you believe in, not matter how hard it makes life for you," she said. "Do not give up and always say what you believe."

..."It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world," she said. "That my family and children and children like mine will have a fair share and equality."

Words for us all to live by.

R.I.P., Crystal Lee Sutton.