Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette was one of six journalists inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame April 14.  Marlette joins Josephus Daniels, Charles Kuralt, Pete McKnight, Vermont Royster, and Tom Wicker, the first inductees in 1981.  Marlette joins Jeff MacNelly as the second cartoonist inducted.
The distinction is reserved for North Carolinians who have made outstanding contributions to journalism, advertising and public relations. 
Marlette began his career in 1971 at The Charlotte Observer, skewering the likes of Jesse Helms and Jim and Tammy Bakker.  He went from Charlotte to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Newsday.
Marlette's cartoons and comic strip "Kudzu," which debuted in 1981, are syndicated by Tribune Media Services and appear in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.  He has won every major award for editorial cartooning and remains, to date, the only cartoonist to receive a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.  Marlette has published 17 collections of cartoons. 
Last year, he published The Bridge, selected the best novel of 2002 by the Southeastern Booksellers' Association.  The book, a bestseller since it bowed in October, has gone into a second printing.
Marlette fashioned The Bridge around a largely forgotten textile strike in 1934 in which nearly half a million workers from North and South Carolina and Georgia walked off their jobs.  Strikers were either murdered or blacklisted after a bloody standoff with the National Guard.
"It was the closest thing to a revolution this country has ever seen," Marlette said.
Crushed three weeks later, the Uprising of 1934 was relegated to memory, andunion  subsequently became a dirty word in the South.
Like his protagonist Pick Cantrell, Marlette discovered his ancestors' roles in the Uprising of 1934 by accident.  He overheard years ago at a family reunion that his grandmother had once been stabbed. 
"I immediately assumed it was some bar fight at a honky-tonk," he said.
Instead, he learned his grandmother, Gracie Pickard, and her brother Walt had been among the most active union agitators during the early 1930s.  In one incident, guardsmen paraded her around town to set an example for union sympathizers.  On Sept. 14, just a day before the General Strike of 1934, Gracie Pickard was bayoneted by guardsmen at Burlington's Pioneer Plant.
Tom Cruise found the story so compelling, he bought the movie rights.  Slated to produce is Don DeLine, former head of Disney's Touchstone Pictures.  Mark Andrus, Oscar-nominated for As Good As It Gets has signed on to adapt the novel. 
"My ancestors for generations worked in the textile mills of Orange and Alamance counties, and education was not an option for them," Marlette said during the induction Sunday.  "But the great people's university of North Carolina has shown like a beacon for their descendants like me.  Because my people were the invisible and voiceless cotton mill workers, we especially cherish our freedom of speech.  I have learned that cartoons and novels, at least the kinds I produce, test the boundaries of that freedom.
"Today, we live in a dangerous age of political correctness, where sometimes the educated elite, in the name of niceness and not hurting feelings, of sensitivity and public virtue, wages war on free expression, even on our campuses, and tries to destroy what Osama bin Laden could not in his assault on this country last September," Marlette said.
"And that's why I am so moved by this ceremony and proud of my association with this state and this university where Dr. Frank [Porter Graham] stood up in the 1930s for the right of Langston Hughes' poetry to appear in a Chapel Hill literary magazine, where Paul Green and C. Vann Woodward stood for the rights of the working poor like my grandmother who was bayoneted to have their voices heard in the struggle for economic justice in the South, where Bill Friday and our state's leading newspapers resisted Speaker Ban laws in the 1960s, where our First Amendment is emblazoned over the doorway and future generations learn to cherish and protect our precious freedom of expression," he said.
"Thomas Wolfe said, 'You can't go home again,' but he also described his time at Chapel Hill 'as close to magic as I've ever been,'" Marlette said.  "I am delighted to be home again and to be part of this magic."
Also inducted this year were the late Harvey Laffooon, former publisher of The Elkin Tribune; Mal Mallette, former managing editor of The Journal&Sentinel in Winston-Salem; and Walter Phillips, editor and publisher of The Cartaret County Times-News.
In addition to teaching at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Marlette is also working on a second novel.  He lives in Hillsborough with his wife Melinda and son Jackson. 

[This preceding story originally appeared in the April 17,2002 edition of The News of Orange County]