Roanoke Rapids: The Real Norma Rae

The Roanoke River drops off the Piedmont plateau here at Roanoke Rapids, where the land tilts toward the coastal plain and the river churns through a natural fall line. In the eighteen nineties, mill owners saw that energy and built the first textile plants beside it. The Roanoke Mills Company incorporated in eighteen ninety-five and began operation in eighteen ninety-seven, and over the next decades Roanoke Rapids became a classic company town, its rhythms set by the looms and shift whistles of cotton and synthetic fiber mills that employed most of the population.

The company that came to dominate that world was J. P. Stevens, the nation's second largest textile manufacturer. And in the mill town where J. P. Stevens held enormous sway over wages, working conditions, and community life, a thirty-two-year-old weaver named Crystal Lee Sutton walked into a union organizing meeting in the spring of nineteen seventy-three and changed her own life and the history of American labor.

Sutton had worked at the Stevens plant for years. She had long resented the company's power over mill families in Roanoke Rapids, but she had no union background. When Eli Zivkovich of the Textile Workers Union of America came to town, Sutton became one of his most visible organizers. Stevens fired her on May thirtieth, nineteen seventy-three, as she was copying a notice onto cardboard on the plant floor. Before police led her out, she climbed onto a workbench and held the cardboard over her head. One word: UNION. Her co-workers shut down their machines.

That image became the basis for the nineteen seventy-nine film Norma Rae, which won Sally Field an Academy Award. The real story took longer. Not until October nineteen eighty did J. P. Stevens settle with the union, recognizing the workers at four Roanoke Rapids plants and delivering the first contract for three thousand employees. The mills are all closed now, but the town that gave America its most famous labor icon is still here, beside its river.