Healthcare - 'Almost like ... committing murder'

The story of Crystal Lee Sutton, below, was told in the movie “Norma Rae,” which starred Sally Field as the young mother of three fired for pro-union activity. The movie portrayal of her holding up a UNION sign before being arrested was an accurate representation of the real-life event. Sutton died in September.

 She never lost focus on the need to help those she called “the working poor.”

Crystal Lee Sutton had struggled with inoperable brain cancer, and she couldn’t get possible life-saving medicines for two months because her insurance company wouldn’t cover them.

“How in the world can it take so long to find out [whether they would cover the medicine] when it could be a matter of life or death,” said Sutton in a 2008 newspaper interview. “It is almost like, in a way, committing murder.”

She eventually received the drugs, but the cancer took its toll, and Sutton – whose life inspired the 1979 film “Norma Rae” – died Sept. 11 in a Burlington, N.C., hospice at age 68.

In 1973 Sutton was a 33-year-old mother of three earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at a North Carolina J.P. Stevens textile plant when a manager fired her for pro-union activity.

But before police hauled her out, she picked up a piece of cardboard and wrote the word “UNION” on it in big letters, a scene filmed verbatim in the movie. “I got up on my work table and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet.”

The poor conditions she and fellow workers endured compelled her to join forces with Eli Zivkovich, a mill worker turned union organizer. In 1974 the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (now Workers United/SEIU) won the right to represent 3,000 workers at seven J.P. Stevens plants in northeastern North Carolina.

Her story became famous nationwide in 1975 after New York Times reporter Henry Leiferman’s book, “Crystal Lee: a Woman of Inheritance,” was published.

Sutton briefly became an organizer for the union, and in 1977 she was awarded back wages and her job was reinstated by court order.

In the 1979 movie “Norma Rae,” actress Sally Field played a character inspired by Sutton and won an Academy Award for best actress.

An amazing symbol of workers standing up in the South against overwhelming odds, Sutton was a hero to the labor movement and spent years as a labor organizer in the 1970s. Sutton later became a certified nursing assistant in 1988.

But she never thought she’d become a symbol of our nation’s health care struggle.

“Stand up for what you believe in, no matter how hard it makes life for you. … Do not give up and always say what you believe,” she said in 2007.

Sutton is survived by her husband of 32 years, Lewis Preston Sutton Jr.; two daughters; three sons; nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Jennifer John