Mark Jordan, a lanky housepainter
whose long hair is
cut in mullet, walked to the
front of the assembly at the Glenwood
Community Center in Greensboro
dressed in a blue pullover, brown
Carhartt pants and leather work boots.
He talked about the mother who
taught him to accept people of all races,
the mother who sent tracts about alcoholism
to him in Hawaii because of an
uncanny sense that he was drinking, the
mother who he could always run things
past. The mother who gave him advice
that that he didn’t always want.
Crystal Lee Sutton’s family filled
three rows of the small gymnasium.
The other seats were filled with labor
activists and officials from across North
Carolina and beyond. Jordan wanted to
remind them that his mother was more
than the labor icon and working-class
heroine, more than the inspiration for a
Hollywood storyline.
“She said, ‘You know what: I didn’t
do it for the money; I did it for the people,’”
Jordan said. “People say, ‘Your
mama’s the real Norma Rae. She’s rich.’
I say, ‘No, it ain’t about that.’”
Sutton, who died last September at
the age of 68 after a long illness, was
honored in Greensboro by her labor
union friends. Her name was praised
by the president of the union for whom
she organized in the 1970s, by the presidents
of the North Carolina AFL-CIOs,
by postal carriers and textile workers. A
laudatory letter was read from workers
in the Philippines who took inspiration
from her. Many of the old labor hymns
were sung.
Thanks to Hollywood, Sutton is
mainly known today for her role in
the successful JP Stevens organizing
campaign in Roanoke Rapids. Stevens
was a textile company whose economic
clout and influence over its employees’
lives matched that of Cone Mills in
Greensboro.
Sutton’s sass and militancy is encapsulated
in a scene portrayed by Sally
Fields in the 1979 movie Norma Rae in
which she emerges from the boss’ office
after being ordered off the premises
for insisting on writing down the exact
words of a racially divisive anti-union
flier posted by management in the break
room. She hastily scrawls the word
“union” on a piece of cardboard, climbs
on a table and slowly turns around as
she waits for the police to arrive and
arrest her.
John Wilhelm, the president of the
UNITE-HERE union, said he didn’t
know Sutton personally, but he heads
the union for which she organized by
virtue of a series of mergers in which
the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile
Workers Union was absorbed into
UNITE, which in turn joined the Hotel
Employees and Restaurant Employees
International Union.
A labor chief endowed with a gruff
and jovial voice and wearing a plain
suit and tie, he talked about going to
school in segregated Virginia as the son
of a woman who campaigned for civil
rights, about heading a union whose
membership is majority female.
“It takes courage for any worker to
stand up and fight the boss in an antiunion
America,” he said. “But it takes
so much more for women who have to
challenge our society’s view of the role
of women, not only in the workplace,
but very often they have to challenge
that view even in their own families,
sometimes with cataclysmic results.”
Sutton’s role in the Stevens campaign
strained her marriage to the breaking
point.
James Andrews, president of the
North Carolina AFL-CIO, grew up in
Warren County, next door to Roanoke
Rapids, where Sutton came up in the
labor movement. He spoke to the
assembly in a booming black preacher’s
voice, and turned to Jordan to acknowledge
that leadership almost always
exacts a toll of sacrifice on families.
“You know these personal hardships
and the pain better than anyone else in
this room,” Andrews said. “She’s been
there for you, brother, and she’s been
there for us.”
Andrews’ counterpart, South Carolina
AFL-CIO President Donna DeWitt,
described what Sutton’s example meant
to her as a young woman trying to find
her way as a telephone operator in the
rural South.
“I was a 17-year-old going to work,
and I could relate to the struggles that
she had,” DeWitt said. “And I was in a
small town. These were the sixties. I’m
so grateful that I can relate to her sense
of injustice in the workplace, her concern
for workers. ‘Wow,’ I would think.
‘Why didn’t I think of getting on a table
with a sign that said ‘union’ and turning
around in that telephone office with 225
operators? Why didn’t I think of that?’
And I’m so proud that she did. All of
this was whirling in my head, and I was
introduced to her. And then I said to
myself: ‘Yes, I knew her.’ And I felt her
pain, her struggle. She was an inspiration,
and she’d given me the courage to
be who I was, and who I am.”
Sutton’s life was not transformed by her fleeting brush with Hollywood fame, her longtime friend Richard Koritz said. Instead, she gained pleasure and esteem from friendships with people of ordinary means, and strength from withstanding insult and adversity. “
Crystal’s life was not filled with
a lot of days like this,” said Koritz, a
labor radical dressed in a suit who owns
a brash voice that reverberates with
Northern cadence. “Crystal’s life was
filled with people talking shit about
her behind her back, people ostracizing
her. In the film Crystal’s character
goes to her minister wanting to have an
integrated union meeting at that church.
And he says, ‘We’re sure going to miss
you in the choir.’
Crystal had a wonderful
singing voice. And Crystal said,
‘You’ll hear my voice rising up somewhere
else.’ That’s a lot of pressure.
I’m not one of those folks that is of the
Christian persuasion, but all of you that
are know the kind of tremendous pressure
that being ostracized by your own
can put on you to back you up, to push
you back into your place.
“So to me, the most remarkable thing about Crystal Lee Sutton was her raw courage,” Koritz continued. “When you’re in a college environment it doesn’t take a heck of a lot of courage. A little bit maybe, to have the courage of your convictions. But when you’re in it from the working class and you threaten the profits of the people that run your town, your city, your state, then you know that if you’re going to act according to the courage of your convictions, then every dirty, rotten trick is going to be pulled on you. And some of it’s going to come from directions that you have no idea that it’s going to come.” !
