by JON ELLISTON
"There was no time the world needed Bob Sheldon more than the day he was killed. It was Feb. 21, 1991, a Thursday. The United States was pounding away at Iraq, 34 days into the Persian Gulf air war. Sheldon was spearheading Triangle-area peace protests from Chapel Hill's Internationalist Books, a hotbed of radical thought and action he had founded back in 1981. During the previous month, he had been shown on the evening news explaining why he had fought the draft during the Vietnam War and why he was contesting the Gulf War. As the ground war loomed, he was gearing up for more teach-ins, vigils and marches.
Sheldon spent the afternoon tending to tasks around the store, and made plans to go out with his friend Ken Kaye after closing at 9 p.m. When Kaye arrived at Internationalist, however, he discovered Sheldon's almost lifeless body on the bloodied floor beside the sales counter. Someone had fired a bullet into his head. About 24 hours after the shooting, Sheldon was pronounced dead at UNC Hospital.
"We lost an intellectual force," says Kathy Giuffre, a friend of Sheldon's who worked a block away at The Cave. "We lost someone who stood up for unpopular positions." Dennis Gavin, owner of the Skylight Exchange, then located across the street from the Internationalist, remembers Sheldon as "a voice of radical calmness" that rose above the din of heated political debates. "He had some radical ideas that he was always able to present in a fairly calm way, and he ran his business in a calm way.""
(Note from 2014 - On the second anniversary of Bob's death, Matt Stewart invited me to come join the vigil held from 7-8 pm in front of Internationalist Books' new Franklin Street store. I think Matt was the Internationalist co-manager at the time, or he might have recently stepped down from that position. It was a moving, somber occasion, and I felt a lot of love for Bob in the hearts of the folks who gathered on Franklin Street that evening.
It was the fall of '89 when I began swinging through Internationalist Books at its 408 West Rosemary location. My excellent freshman history professor Don Reid had instructed students in his HIST 140 - World History Since 1945 class (where Alvis Dunn was my TA and doing a great job helping Professor Reid awaken our young, naive minds to the hidden history of U.S. imperialism) to buy their textbooks from the store. So Internationalist Books was the whole reason I first set foot on Rosemary Street, two doors down from where in later years I would spend many a night tending shop myself at the Lost City.
I can't remember anything specific about my interactions with Bob during the year and a half before he was killed, except that he struck me as a super cool guy. The few times I saw him in the store, he was usually engrossed in lively conversation, either with another customer or talking on the phone. But he was always friendly and welcoming towards everyone, and I know we chatted from time to time.
According to a story I heard a few years ago, when Amiri Baraka came to UNC to speak sometime during this era, and a student was put in charge of chaperoning him around town, Internationalist was the only place Baraka wanted to visit. And FBI types in dark suits and sunglasses followed the two of them into the store and kept a close watch on every word Baraka exchanged with Bob Sheldon. If Internationalist Books hadn't been on the power structure's radar before then, it sure was thereafter.)
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