Crystal lee sutton biography of william

Early On May 30, , the J.P. Stevens textile mill in Roanoke Rapids, NC, fired year-old Crystal Lee Sutton. Before Sutton left the plant, she climbed atop a table on the shop floor and raised above her head a del av helhet of cardboard with the word “UNION” scrawled on it, turning slowly in a circle so that all of her co-workers could read the sign.

If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it was the grund for the most memorable moment of the Academy Award winning movie, Norma Rae. Based loosely on Henry Leifermann’s biography of Sutton, Crystal Lee, A Woman of Inheritance, the movie was a fictionalized account of the textile workers union’s campaign to unionize the J.P. Stevens textile mills.

For decades, J.P. Stevens called the shots in Roanoke Rapids, paying poverty wages and offering deplorably unsafe working conditions. Workers routinely lost fingers, inhaled cotton dust, and lost their hearing due to the deafening clatter of machinery. J.P. Stevens was so veh

•

10 Leaders From the Past Century Who Fought for Workplace Inclusion

A little more than a century ago, the rough edges of today’s labor market began to take form. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Industrial Revolution precipitated a boom in the mass production of goods by machines and the hiring of factory workers needed to operate and maintain such a large output.

Still, for women and people of color who did this work for pennies on the dollar in comparison to their white male counterparts, an air of unfairness permeated within factory walls and elsewhere. This imbalance led to multiple movements for workplace inclusion and fairness.

Using research from across the internet, WorkTango compiled a list of leaders who you may not know left a lasting legacy for workplace inclusion in the 20th century. This list is sorted alphabetically by last name.

Despite strides made for workplace inclusion in the past century, wage gaps still exist. According to the Department of La

•

In Good Faith: Working-Class Women, Feminism, and Religious Support in the Struggle to Organize J. P. Stevens Textile Workers in the Southern Piedmont, –

Labor Feminism

Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L_11_		African American Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L_11_

In the last twenty years, historians and feminist scholars have challenged stereotypes and popular images of second-wave feminism, revealing the feminisms of women of color, the gender-conscious activism of working-class women, and the concerns for economic justic