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GRAHAM — It was Sally Field’s Oscar moment: The character of Norma Rae, about to be dragged from her job on the factory floor, stages a last act of defiance.

She scrawls “UNION” on a piece of cardboard and stands on a table, while one by one co-workers shut down their machines in support as she is hauled off by the police.

The most remarkable thing about the scene? It really took place, just up the road in Roanoke Rapids, to a woman named Crystal Lee Sutton, who made $2.65 an hour folding towels at J.P. Stevens.

“I tried to make her get down. I didn’t want her to get fired,” older sister Syretha Medlin recalled Sunday after a memorial for Sutton, who died last week at 68 after a long illness.

“I felt proud but upset at the time. I knew she was going to fight with everything she was worth.”

The union fight that was dramatized in the 1979 movie “Norma Rae” catapulted a small-town daughter of mill parents into a labor icon.

Three decades later, Sutton still cast a long enough shadow that when former President Bill Clinton made his small-town swing through North Carolina during the 2008 primary, he made a point to visit Sutton.

And when news of her death after a battle with cancer — and with her health insurer — reached news wires Friday, messages of sympathy came from as far away as a trade union in the Philippines.

“I’ve never been through an organizing campaign where somebody didn’t mention Norma Rae,” said friend Mark Diamondstein, a longtime organizer with the American Postal Workers Union.

“I think it’s so compelling because the common person did such uncommon things. People looked at her story and thought, 'I can do that, too.’”

Sutton’s involvement in labor organizing, coming at a time of great change in the early 1970s, became a key to her personal liberation, noted longtime friend Richard Koritz.

When Sutton aligned herself with labor organizer Eli Zivkovich, women were typically discouraged from labor activity — sometimes by their own husbands and parents.

“The union was a vehicle for her to stand up with full dignity,” Koritz said.

“It was about more than getting a few more cents an hour. It took a phenomenal courage. A phenomenal fearlessness.”

But for the family who crowded into McClure Funeral Home on Sunday to look at snapshots and swap stories of a colorful life, this wasn’t a farewell to a labor matriarch. It was farewell to a mother of five and grandmother of a large, tight-knit family.

Even the Baptist preacher seemed hard-pressed to fit Sutton’s large, sprawling life into the margins of his sermon.

Said the Rev. Walter Jones: “She seemed to soften toward the end. But one day when I visited, someone was there and said, 'It’s the preacher. Do you want to see him?’ The answer was, 'No,’” drawing knowing chuckles from Sutton’s relatives.

Medlin, Sutton’s older sister who worked with her at the textile mill, said the union organizing had not only cost Sutton a marriage, but also made it difficult for her younger sister to find a job.

In later years, Sutton ran a day care center but had developed serious health problems including brain cancer. In 2008, Sutton told Burlington’s Times-News that she was having difficulty getting her health insurance company to cover the medication she needed, and that there had been a lapse in her treatment.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com