Strong Women Series #4: Crystal Lee Sutton


The Camel and the Scorpion is a book inspired by true events. It is the story of #StrongWomen - Caroline, Lydia, Anna - who spoke out for a good world despite the personal and professional risks to themselves in doing so.

This post is the fourth in my Strong Women Series. The series honors women and girls of courage.


Crystal Lee Sutton. Source: LA Times


Never heard of Crystal Lee Sutton? If no, you may recognize her movie-world name, Norma Rae, as played by Sally Field.

From the Los Angeles Times:
In 1973, Sutton worked at the J.P. Stevens textile plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. Fed up with the poor pay and working conditions, she joined the Textile Workers Union of America and became an organizer whose activism quickly earned the wrath of management.
Moments after being fired, she wrote "UNION" on a piece of cardboard, climbed onto a table in the middle of the factory floor and raised the sign for co-workers to see. Stunned by her courage, they switched off their machines and focused on the 33-year-old mother of three who earned $2.65 an hour.
Some raised their fingers in a V for victory, but a union contract was still years away.
The victory that day was over fear.


Ms. Sutton didn't just have to conquer her fear about her bosses and lack of income, she had to overcome fear about going against the tide of her friends, family, and neighbors who also worked in the mill. From the APWU:
As the daughter of mill workers herself, Sutton felt mill workers’ children learned an attitude of resignation from their parents. “All their life, all the children ever hear is J.P. The parents come home and say, ‘Lord a mercy, they worked me down today,’” she explained to Leifermann. [emphasis mine]


Listen to Ms. Sutton in this 1980 interview from Pacifica Radio, which is in the University at Albany's Talking History archive. Ms. Sutton describes "brown lung," a common affliction of textile-factory workers, which eventually kills its victims. Although her aunt suffered symptoms of brown lung, she was afraid to get diagnosed with brown lung because she was afraid the company would find out about it and fire her.


"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 in a 2008 Burlington Times-News interview [in 2008]. "That my family and children and children like mine will have a fair share and equality."


" .... People are going to long know where I'm coming from: I believe working people need to join together, and the only thing they got going for them now is a union." Washington Post, 1985. 


Women of courage like Crystal Lee Sutton? They are who kept me writing The Camel and the Scorpion for 20 years, so I could share the stories of women like The Camel and the Scorpion protagonists, Caroline, Lydia, and Anna.

Honorable, imperfect, brave, vulnerable champions, all of them. Risking their personal and professional lives to stand up for their ideals.

Crystal Lee Sutton died in 2009.



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