Crystal Lee Sutton and the Union Sign at a North Carolina Textile Mill

The sign was a piece of cardboard. In late May 1973, in a J.P. Stevens textile plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, a mill worker in her early thirties named Crystal Lee Jordan had just been fired, and she was waiting for the police to come and take her out of the building. She had refused to leave quietly. While she waited she took a marker, wrote the word UNION on the cardboard in big letters, climbed up on her worktable and turned slowly so that everyone on the floor could read it. One by one, the people at the machines around her switched them off. The weaving room went quiet. Then the police arrived and drove her away. Six years later, a Hollywood studio would turn that moment into a famous movie scene. The part the movie could not show was what came after: a union vote, a long war with one of the biggest textile companies in America and a first contract that took until 1980.

In short: Crystal Lee Sutton was fired from J.P. Stevens in 1973 for union activity and stood on a worktable holding a sign that read UNION. Workers in Roanoke Rapids voted for the union in 1974, but the company fought a contract for six more years. Her story shows both the courage it takes to organize and how long the law lets employers delay.

The mill town and the company

Roanoke Rapids sits near the Virginia line in northeastern North Carolina, a town built around cotton mills along the Roanoke River. By the 1970s, J.P. Stevens owned a cluster of plants there that employed thousands of people making towels, sheets and other textiles. Stevens was one of the largest textile companies in the country, headquartered in New York, with dozens of plants across the Carolinas and the South.

Textile work in the Southern mills was a family inheritance. Crystal Lee was born Crystal Lee Pulley in 1940, and her parents had both worked in the mills. She went into the plants as a teenager. The pay was low compared with factory work in the North, the heat and dust in the weaving rooms were hard on the body, and workers who complained could find themselves out of a job with nowhere else in town to go. Brown lung disease, caused by breathing cotton dust, was a known danger that workers had been living with for generations.

Southern textiles had also been the graveyard of union drives. The great general textile strike of 1934 had collapsed in the South, and the postwar campaign to organize the region's mills had largely failed. Owners in the mill towns often controlled much more than the plant: the houses, the stores, the churches' good will and the local newspaper's attention. Organizing in such places was not just a matter of persuading workers. It was a matter of persuading them that the union would still be there after the company had made an example of someone.

The organizer and the copied letter

In 1973, the Textile Workers Union of America sent an organizer named Eli Zivkovich to Roanoke Rapids. He was a former coal miner from West Virginia, an outsider to the town, and he needed local workers willing to be seen with him. Crystal Lee, a mother of three who had already had a hard life, became one of the most visible.

Her firing grew out of a fight over a bulletin board. The company had posted a notice to employees about the union campaign that, workers understood, played on racial fear: it suggested that Black workers would dominate the union. The plants in Roanoke Rapids had both Black and white workers, and the union's campaign depended on them standing together. Crystal Lee set out to copy the notice word for word so the union could challenge it. Supervisors told her to stop. She kept copying. Managers then called her into the office and fired her, and when she refused to go without a fight, they called the police.

That is where the cardboard came in. The sign was not a staged protest. It was an improvised act by a woman who knew she was already finished at the plant and wanted to make sure her co-workers saw why. The machines going silent was their answer.

A vote won in 1974

The firing did not end the campaign; it helped energize it. In August 1974, workers at the seven Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids voted in an election run by the National Labor Relations Board, and the Textile Workers Union won. It was a rare victory in Southern textiles and a national labor story.

The company had spent years resisting unions across its operations, and the federal labor board and the courts had repeatedly found that Stevens broke the law in doing so, including by firing union supporters. Crystal Lee's own case went through the board, which found her firing unlawful. In the system as it worked then, and largely as it works now, that kind of finding meant reinstatement and back pay, eventually. It did not mean anything that would make a large company think twice.

That gap between winning the vote and winning anything else is the center of this story.

Six years without a contract

Under federal labor law, an employer whose workers have voted for a union must bargain in good faith. The law does not require the employer to agree to anything. A company that is willing to meet, to talk and to reject proposals can stretch a first negotiation for years, and the penalties for doing so have always been mild. That is what happened in Roanoke Rapids. Stevens met with the union and did not sign.

The union changed its strategy. In 1976 the Textile Workers merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and the new union launched a national consumer boycott of J.P. Stevens products. Churches, civil rights groups and students took it up. Activists also tried what came to be called a corporate campaign, a new tactic aimed not at the plant floor but at the company's connections in the financial world: the banks and insurers whose boards included Stevens directors, and whose own boards included Stevens's chairman. The pressure made the company's labor record a problem for people who had never seen a towel factory.

In October 1980, more than six years after the vote, J.P. Stevens and the union signed a contract covering the Roanoke Rapids workers. It was a real victory, and also a sobering one. Some of the people who voted in 1974 had left, retired or died before the contract that their vote should have produced.

The movie and the woman

In 1979 the film "Norma Rae," directed by Martin Ritt, told a fictionalized version of the story, with Sally Field as a Southern mill worker who climbs on a table with a hand-lettered sign. Field won the Academy Award for best actress. The scene became one of the most recognized images of American labor, so familiar that people who have never heard of J.P. Stevens know it.

The film changed details, combined people and added romance, as films do. It also made a working-class Southern woman the hero of a story about organizing, which was rare then and is not common now. Crystal Lee, who had remarried and was by then Crystal Lee Sutton, had complicated feelings about it, and she spent years afterward telling the real version at union halls, colleges and rallies. The Labor Board ordered her reinstated, and she did go back to the plant with back pay around the time the contract was signed, though she did not stay long. She later worked as an organizer herself.

She died in September 2009, at 68, after a long illness. In the last years of her life she spoke publicly about fighting her insurance company over delays in her cancer treatment, a final campaign that tied the old fight over a mill paycheck to the newer one over health care.

The employer's case, and the gap in the law

What would J.P. Stevens have said? Its defenders made arguments that companies still make. A union, they said, would bring a third party into the relationship between employer and employee, raise costs in an industry already losing ground to imports and threaten the very jobs workers were trying to protect. The company had a right to tell its side. Southern textile plants did in fact close in huge numbers in the following decades as production moved overseas, and some of the people who opposed the union pointed to that as vindication.

Here is the answer, offered as this blog's argument. Imports and automation were going to reshape the textile industry no matter what the workers in Roanoke Rapids did. The question was whether workers would have any voice in how that happened: in safety, in severance, in the pace of the line and the cotton dust in the air. The company did not merely tell its side. It broke the law, repeatedly, according to the board and the courts that reviewed its conduct. A system in which a company can fire a union supporter, pay back wages years later and stall a contract for six years has not struck a fair balance between speech and organizing. It has set a price on lawbreaking, and the price is low.

That gap has not closed. First contracts still often take more than a year to reach, and many drives that win elections never get one. Labor reformers have proposed mediation and binding arbitration for first contracts and real financial penalties for illegal firings; none of that has become federal law.

What her story asks of the rest of us

It is tempting to remember Crystal Lee Sutton as a symbol and forget she was a person. She was a mill worker who had been poor, who had been through heartbreak, who was not a professional activist and who decided that a racially divisive notice on a bulletin board was worth losing her job over. She stood with her Black co-workers when the company was trying to split them from her. Her neighbors took a risk by switching off their machines. Many of them had no idea whether they would be next.

Those are the people who carry every union drive: not stars, but people who decide to stand up in a room where everyone can see them. The question for the rest of us is whether the law will back them when they do.

Black and white workers in the same weave room

The bulletin-board notice that cost Crystal Lee her job touched the rawest nerve in Southern industry. For most of the twentieth century, the production jobs in Southern textile mills, the better-paid work at the looms and spinning frames, had been reserved largely for white workers. Black workers were kept mostly to the hardest and lowest-paid jobs in the yards, warehouses and cleaning crews. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made job discrimination illegal, and through the late 1960s and early 1970s, lawsuits and federal pressure pushed Black workers, many of them women, into production jobs in the mills in much larger numbers.

That change reshaped union organizing. Black workers who had just fought their way into the mills often saw the union as a continuation of the civil rights movement: another way to make sure that the rules applied to everyone and that a supervisor could not fire someone on a whim. Many were among the union's strongest supporters in Roanoke Rapids and elsewhere in the South. Employers, for their part, had long used racial fear to keep white workers away from unions, warning that organizing meant mixing, and that a union would be run by people white workers had been taught to distrust.

Crystal Lee was a white woman from a white mill-working family. Copying that notice so it could be challenged was a public choice to stand against the oldest strategy in the region's labor history. The union vote in 1974, won with Black and white votes together, was a refusal of the same strategy. That part of the story rarely makes it into retellings, and it is the part that matters most for organizing anywhere that employers try to set one group of workers against another.

What you can do

If her story stirs something in you, put it to work:

• Follow today's organizing. The labor page shows the most recent union elections counted by the National Labor Relations Board, who won them and how membership has changed over the years. Many of the newest drives are in the South.
• Push for a law that gets workers to a contract. Use find your representatives to look up your members of Congress and state legislators by address, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes. Ask them where they stand on first-contract arbitration and penalties for illegal firings.
• Back the groups doing the work. The organizations directory lists unions, worker centers and legal-aid groups in every state, including organizations that help workers who are fired for organizing.
• Read deeper. Our topic page on corporate power collects reporting on how large employers fight unions and how workers push back.

And if you ever see someone stand up on a worktable, so to speak, at your job or in your town, consider turning off your machine.