Crystal Lee Sutton
Crystal Lee Sutton (née Pulley; December 31, 1940 – September 11, 2009) was an American union organizer and advocate who gained fame in 1979 when the film Norma Rae was released, based on events related to her being fired from her job at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, on May 30, 1973, for "insubordination" after she copied an anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board. == Union activism and recognition == Sutton was one of the union activists during the J.P. Stevens controversy—one of "the ugliest episodes in labor history in the United States which took place from about 1963 to 1980" during which Stevens "repeatedly harassed or fired union activists" and the union "countered with a boycott of Stevens products" and a "campaign to isolate the company by pressuring companies that dealt with Stevens or had Stevens officers on their boards." In 1973 Sutton saw a union poster hanging in one of the seven mills in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina owned by J.P. Stevens & Company mills where three generations of her family had worked—living in a neighborhood where the Company "owned every shotgun house" in Sutton's neighborhood.