Storyline
How Internationalist Books on West Rosemary Street went on after its founder, Bob Sheldon, was shot in the store in February 1991: the mourning and vigils, the friends’ committee and reward, the reopening with volunteers, the passing of the store to its board and the march a year later.
In briefBob Sheldon, who founded Internationalist Books in 1981, was found shot in his West Rosemary Street store on February 21, 1991 and died the next day. Hundreds mourned him, and friends formed a committee, offered a reward and reopened the store with volunteers. His family passed the store to its board that fall, and a year after his death no arrest had been made. Friends held a vigil at the store on the second anniversary in 1993.
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Internationalist Books, a leftist bookstore run by a volunteer collective, opened in December 1981 in a room above the Henderson Street Bar. Its founder, Bob Sheldon, a nurse at the Student Health Service, had long sold books and buttons from a table in the Pit. By 1991 Sheldon, a political activist, had run the store at 408 West Rosemary Street for almost 10 years. About 9 p.m. on February 21, 1991 he was found shot in the head in the store, and he died at UNC Hospitals the next afternoon. Police found no witnesses or suspects. About 500 people mourned him at the Community Church of Chapel Hill on February 24, and others held a candlelight vigil in the Pit.
On February 27 six of his friends and associates formed a committee, announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, and set out to reopen the store. The store reopened on April 1 with volunteer staff, run as a taxable nonprofit corporation under a board the committee was to choose; no arrest had been made, and a reward of $62,000 was then offered. In late October 1991 Sheldon's family passed ownership to the store's nine-member board so that it could go on in his memory. On February 21, 1992, the first anniversary of his murder, friends and family gathered at the Chapel Hill post office and marched to the store, where speakers recalled his peace work during the Gulf crisis. No arrest had been made. On February 21, 1993 friends and colleagues held a candlelight vigil at the store on the second anniversary and marched to the Sports Bar to hear folk songs in his memory; the store's co-managers said his friends had kept it open since his death.
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Background reading on Literature & Publishing. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
John Ehle's account of the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963 and 1964 and the young people who led them, first published by Harper & Row in 1965. This reprint from Lewisville, North Carolina adds an afterword by Wayne King. Civil rights and race relations in Chapel Hill are its subjects. 340 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Daniel W. Barefoot arranges first-hand recollections of the University of North Carolina by decade, from the 'infant university' of the 1790s through the Civil War years when promise turned to despair, the rebuilding of the 1870s, the 'frosh' life of the 1880s, wartime fame in the 1940s, the controversies of the 1960s and the bicentennial of the 1990s. Thomas Wolfe's student years appear among the voices. Published by John F. Blair of Winston-Salem in 2008, 257 pages.
Will Blythe's account of the Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry, described in its subtitle as thoroughly obsessive, intermittently uplifting and occasionally unbiased. Blythe writes as a Chapel Hill partisan, and the book treats sports rivalries, basketball fans and the social side of the game in North Carolina. Published by HarperCollins in New York in 2006, first edition, 357 pages.
Jean Bradley Anderson's history of the Bennehan and Cameron families and their plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh, on lands that lay in Orange County until Durham County was formed from it in 1881. Published by the Historic Preservation Society of Durham in 1985, the book follows plantation life and ownership across several generations, with genealogical tables, a map, portraits, a bibliography and an index; 227 pages plus plates.
Reviewed in South Atlantic Quarterly (1987).
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Art Chansky's 2009 history of the Carolina basketball dynasty that three coaches, Frank McGuire and Dean Smith among them, built at the University of North Carolina. Smith wrote the foreword and Rick Brewer the introduction. Chapters cover Final Fours, the Larry Brown bond, recruiting and the program's records.
Margaret Ruth Little-Stokes's survey of Chapel Hill's town and campus buildings from 1795 to 1975, published by the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill in 2006. Chapters run from the first campus buildings through David Swain's romantic campus to midcentury modernism, followed by area surveys of the campus, east and west Chapel Hill, downtown, Northside and the suburbs.
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
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