Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple

Jim Jones & The Jonestown Massacre

On November 18, 1978 in a jungle in the middle of Guyana, more than 900 people ended their own lives and the lives of their children in a mass suicide. You may wonder what would move that amount of people to murder themselves? Most importantly, who is responsible for this massacre? and why? I will reveal to you who is responsible, and how he single-handedly convinced these people (his followers) to commit revolutionary suicide.

The man accountable for the mass suicide is Jim Jones also known as "James Warren Jones". Jones was an American cult leader and community organizer. He was born in a rural area of Randolph County, Indiana, to James Thurman and Lynetta Putnam in may 13,1931. His father was a World War I veteran as well as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. (Ku Klux Klan was a distinct movement in the US which was overthrown around 1920s). As a child, Jim Jones started reading books related to Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler. He studied these men discreetly, noting each of their strengths and weaknesses. He admired how these men took action against things they believed. He also had a weird, intense obsession with religion and death. He conducted funerals for dead animals which he had found and sometimes for animals he killed himself. He would also teach the children in his neighborhood about Christianity. However, his father didn't approve of his belief on the issue of race and religion. Since his father was associated with the Ku Klux Klan, therefore he didn't approve of his son's friendship with an African-American boy nor did he approve of his son's belief.

Jim Jones married Marceline Jones in 1949, who was a Registered nurse and a state health inspector of nursing homes. They had eight children, seven of which were adopted from different nations.The couple's three children were of Korean-American ancestry: Lew, Suzanne, and Stephanie. (Jones had been encouraging Temple members to adopt orphans from war ravaged Korea). In 1954, he and his wife also adopted Agnes Jones, who was partly of Native American descent. Suzanne Jones was later adopted in 1959. However, in June 1959, the couple had their first and only biological child called Stephan Gandhi Jones. Two years later, they became the first Caucasians in Indiana to adopt a black child and named him James Warren Jones, Jr. The couple also adopted another son, who was caucasian, named Tim. Tim Jones, whose birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper. Jim Jones referred to his clan as the "rainbow family."

How did Jones find a way to demonstrate his Marxist views without facing persecution?

Jones found his method through religion to demonstrate his Marxist views and soon became a part of the Pentecostal Church. He was amazed by the level of control and power the preachers had over their followers, he then became a student pastor in Sommer set Southside Methodist Church. After which he was discharged from that church after a couple of months because he allowed inter-racial people into the church. However, he claimed that he left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation. After his discharge, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at a Seventh Day Baptist Church. He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that, with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals.

Jones organized a religious convention to take place on June 11 through June 15, 1956. To draw the crowds, Jim needed a religious headliner, and so he arranged to share the lectern with Rev. William M. Branham. Rev.Branham was a healing preacher and religious author. Following the convention, Jones then began his own church, which changed names a couple of times until it became the People's Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. Jonestown was the informal name of Peoples Temple Church.The Peoples Temple was initially made as an inter-racial mission, but afterward it became a religious movement.

Why did the Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell of Indianapolis advice Jones to keep a low profile about the integration?

In 1960, Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell assigned Jones Director of the Human Rights Commission. Jim was told by the Democratic Mayor to keep a low profile about his integration. But Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile so he helped to integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the , a theater, an amusement park, and the Hospital.

When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, he resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and climaxed with, "Let my people go!".

During the integration, Jim's idea of having an interracial community did not appeal the community. After swastikas were painted on the homes of African-American families and on the temple, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting local blacks and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight. They hid dynamite in the temples coal pile, a dead cat was thrown at his house and many other incidents occurred, though some of them are suspected that Jim himself may have been involved in some of them. The restaurants and white-owned businesses in the community would refuse to serve African American customers and so he set up to catch restaurants and/or white-owned businesses refusing to serve African American customers. Most of the white-owned businesses and locals were critical of him.

After Jones received criticism in for his views, the Temple moved to in 1965.

How and when did Jones start to reveal his communist ideas?

By the late 1960s, Jones began to slowly unravel the details of his "Apostolic Socialism" in Temple sermons. Jones also taught that, "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism." He often preached that, "If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin."

Jones showed them that he was much mightier than Christianity and God. Around 1970s, he began to mock Christianity as "fly away religion", rejecting the Bible as being a tool to abuse women and non-whites, and denouncing that God was not real. Jones wrote a booklet called "The Letter Killeth," criticizing the King James Bible. He also began preaching to his followers that he was the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi and Father Divine, as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Gautama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin. A Former Temple member Hue Fortson, Jr. quoted Jones as saying, "What you need to believe in is what you can see ... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father ... If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God."

Jones stated that he was an agnostic and an atheist. Marceline Jones admitted in a 1977 New York Times interview that her husband, Jim Jones was trying to promote his Marxist views in the States by assembling people through religion. She stated that, "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion," and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling "I've got to destroy this paper idol!" In one sermon, Jones said that, "You're gonna help yourself, or you'll get no help! There's only one hope of glory; that's within you! Nobody's gonna come out of the sky! There's no heaven up there! We'll have to make heaven down here!"

How did members of the group get well established into the sub-cultural world of Peoples Temple that many of them didn't think anything was wrong?

In 1974, the Peoples Temple signed a lease to rent land in Guyana. The community created on this property was called the , or the informal name "Jonestown". Jim Jones left for Guyana,when an article based on ex-members of the temple talked about how Jones church runned. After he left, he encouraged Temple members to follow him there. The population grew to over 900 people by 1978. and those who moved there were promised a tropical paradise.

On November 17, 1978, Leo Ryan, a Congressman from the San Francisco area visited Jonestown. Because he heard from some of his constituents that their family members were people being held against their will at Jonestown. During his visit, sixteen members of the Temple wanted to leave with the Congressman. thus Ryan and the sixteen members went to the local airstrip at Port Kaituma to go back to the US. Once they reached the airstrip, they were intercepted by Temple security guards who were sent by jones to open fire on the group, killing Congressman Ryan, three journalists, one of the Temple defectors and the other fifteen run away.The same day as the murders at the airstrip, Jones told his followers that soldiers would come for them and torture them. He ordered everyone to gather in the main pavilion and commit what he termed a "Revolutionary Act". Every member was told to drink from the kool-aid that had cyanide in it and lay down next to their family members. Jones was found in his cabin with a bullet in his head, no one knows whether he committed suicide or if he was murdered. This revolutionary act resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the attack caused by terrorists in september 11,2001.

"Don't drink the Kool-Aid"

 〜 FIN ～