James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 suicide of more than 900 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip.
Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in that state in the 1950s. Jones and the Temple later moved to California, and both gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the mid-1970s.
The greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001, the tragedy at Guyana also ranks among the largest mass murders/mass suicides in history. One of those who died at the nearby airstrip was Leo Ryan, who remains the only Congressman murdered in the line of duty in the history of the United States.
Early life
Jim Jones was born in
Crete, Indiana, a rural
unincorporated community in
Randolph County near the
Ohio border, Jones would later claim partial
Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though this was likely false according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer.
In interviews for the 2006 documentary , childhood acquaintances recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death", and claimed that he frequently held funerals for small animals, and had reportedly fatally stabbed a cat as a young child. After Jones' parents separated, he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana. He attended Indiana University at Bloomington, where a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African Americans impressed him. In 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis, where he attended night school at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961. particularly regarding an event he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending. This frustration, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself "how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."
Jones' interest in religion began during his childhood, primarily because he found making friends difficult, though initially he vacillated on his church of choice. Jones was surprised when a Methodist superintendent helped him to get a start in the church even though he knew Jones to be a communist and Jones did not meet him through the American Communist Party. In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation. Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at the 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 then began his own church, which changed names until it became the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. Jones sold pet monkeys door-to-door to raise funds for his church. 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!" After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting African Americans and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight. and wrote to American Nazi leaders then leaked their responses to the media.
Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views. White-owned businesses and locals were critical of him. A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones' house after a threatening phone call. Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them.
Jones' "Rainbow Family"
Jim and Marceline Jones adopted several children of at least partial non-Caucasian ancestry; he referred to the clan as his "rainbow family," Jones portrayed the Temple overall as a "rainbow family."
The couple adopted three children of Korean-American ancestry: Lew, Suzanne and Stephanie. Jones had been encouraging Temple members to adopt orphans from war ravaged Korea. Agnes was 11 at the time of her adoption. In June 1959, the couple had their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi Jones.
The couple also adopted another son, who was white, named Tim. Tim Jones, whose birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper.
Asylum
After a 1961 Temple speech about
nuclear apocalypse, and a January 1962
Esquire Magazine article listing
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as a safe place in a
nuclear war, Jones traveled with his family to the
Brazilian city with the idea of setting up a new Temple location. Jones also explored local
Brazilian religion. When Jones' associate preachers in Indiana told him that the Temple was about to collapse without him, Jones returned. Accordingly, the Temple began moving to
Redwood Valley, California, near Ukiah.
While Jones always spoke of the social gospel's virtues, before the late 1960s Jones chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism. By the late 1960s, Jones began at least partially openly revealing in Temple sermons his "Apostolic Socialism" concept. Specifically, "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism." Jones authored a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth," criticizing the King James Bible.
By the spring of 1976, Jones began openly admitting even to outsiders that he was an atheist. 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!"
Move to San Francisco
The move of Peoples Temple headquarters to San Francisco in 1975 invigorated Jones' political career. After the Temple served an important role in the mayoral election victory of
George Moscone in 1975, Moscone appointed Jones as the Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission. Regarding the leader of those attempting to extricate relatives from Jonestown, Milk wrote he was "attempting to damage Rev. Jones reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies."
On April 11, 1978, the Concerned Relatives distributed a packet of documents, including letters and affidavits, that they titled an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones" to the Peoples Temple, members of the press and members of Congress.
Facing increasing scrutiny, in the summer of 1978, Jones also hired noted JFK assassination conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Donald Freed to help make the case of a "grand conspiracy" by intelligence agencies against the Peoples Temple.
Visit by Congressman Ryan, murders
In November 1978, U.S. Congressman
Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of
human rights abuses. On November 17, Ryan's delegation traveled by airplane to
Jonestown. Congressman Ryan and his people succeeded in taking with them fifteen People's Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave. The five killed at the airstrip were Congressman Ryan; Don Harris, a reporter from
NBC; Bob Brown, a cameraman from NBC; San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson; and Temple member Patricia Parks. Surviving the attack were future
Congresswoman Jackie Speier, then a staff member for Ryan; Richard Dwyer, the
Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. Embassy at Georgetown; Bob Flick, a producer for NBC News; Steve Sung, an NBC sound engineer; Tim Reiterman, a
San Francisco Examiner reporter; Ron Javers, a
San Francisco Chronicle reporter; Charles Krause, a
Washington Post reporter; and several defecting Temple members.
The murder of Congressman Ryan was the only murder of a Congressman in the line of duty in the history of the United States. The reason given by Jones to commit suicide was consistent with his previously stated conspiracy theories of intelligence organizations allegedly conspiring against the Temple, that men would "parachute in here on us," "shoot some of our innocent babies" and "they'll torture our children, they'll torture some of our people here, they'll torture our seniors." Parroting Jones' prior statements that hostile forces would convert captured children to fascism, one temple member states "the ones that they take captured, they're gonna just let them grow up and be dummies."
Given that reasoning, Jones and several members argued that the group should commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid (often misidentified as Kool-Aid) along with a sedative. One member, Christine Miller, dissents toward the beginning of the tape. When members apparently cried, Jones counseled "Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity." Jones can be heard saying, "Don't be afraid to die," that death is "just stepping over into another plane" and that "[death is] a friend." At the end of the tape, Jones concludes: "We didn't commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world." According to escaping Temple members, children were given the drink first and families were told to lie down together.
Jones was found dead in a deck chair with a gunshot wound to his head that Guyanese coroner Cyrill Mootoo stated was consistent with a self-inflicted gun wound.
While Jones banned sex among Temple members outside of marriage, he himself voraciously engaged in sexual relations with both male and female Temple members.
One of Jones' sources of inspiration was the controversial International Peace Mission movement leader Father Divine. from Black Panther leader and Peoples Temple supporter Huey Newton who had argued "the slow suicide of life in the ghetto" ought to be replaced by revolutionary struggle that would end only in victory (socialism and self determination) or revolutionary suicide (death).
Family aftermath
Marceline
Jim Jones' wife, Marceline, was found poisoned around the pavilion. Guyanese soldiers kept the Jones brothers under house arrest for five days, interrogating them about the deaths in Georgetown. Stephan Jones was accused of being involved in the Georgetown deaths, and was placed in a Guyanese prison for three months. Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb, another member of the Peoples Temple
basketball team, were asked to go to Jonestown and help identify the bodies of people who had died. After returning to the United States, Jim Jones Jr. was placed under police surveillance for several months while he lived with his older sister, Suzanne, who had previously turned against the Temple.
When Jonestown was first being established, Stephan Jones had originally avoided two attempts by his father to relocate to the settlement. He eventually moved to Jonestown after a third and final attempt. He has since said that he gave into his father's wishes to move to Jonestown because of his mother. including Rob Jones, a high-school basketball star who went on to play for the University of San Diego before transferring to Saint Mary's College of California.
Suzanne Jones married Mike Cartmell; both turned against the Temple and were not in Jonestown on November 18, 1978. After this decision to abandon the Temple, Jones referred to Suzanne openly as "my goddamned, no good for nothing daughter" and stated that she was not to be trusted. In a signed note found at the time of her death, Marceline Jones directed that the Jones' funds were to be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and specified: "I especially request that none of these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell." Cartmell had two children and died of colon cancer in November 2006.
John Stoen and Kimo
Specific references to Tim Stoen, the father of John Stoen, including the logistics of possibly murdering him, are made on the Temple's final "death tape," as well as a discussion over whether the Temple should include John Stoen among those committing "revolutionary suicide." At
Jonestown, John Stoen was found poisoned in Jim Jones' cabin.
Both Jim Jon (Kimo) and his mother, Carolyn Layton, died during the events at Jonestown.
See also
Cult suicide
Doomsday cult
List of people who have claimed to be Jesus
List of Buddha claimants
Notes
References
Bibliography
Chidester, David, Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the People's Temple and Jonestown (Religion in North America), 2nd rev.ed., Indiana University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0253216328
Klineman, George and Sherman Butler. The Cult That Died. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1980. ISBN 0-399-12540-X.
Layton, Deborah. Seductive Poison. Anchor Books, 1999. ISBN 0-385-48984-6.
Maaga, Mary McCormick. Hearing the voices of Jonestown. Syracuse University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8156-0515-3.
Naipaul, Shiva. Black & White. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1980. ISBN 0-241-10337-1.
External links
The Jonestown Institute
FBI No. Q 042 The "Jonestown Death Tape", Recorded 18 November 1978 (Internet Archive)
Transcript of Jones' final speech, just before the mass suicide
The first part of a series of articles about Jim Jones published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1972.
History Channel Video and Stills
Isaacson, Barry. From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre
Mass Suicide at Jonestown: 30 Years Later, Time magazine
Jonestown 30 Years Later photo gallery published Friday, October 17, 2008.
, "Jonestown: The Life And Death Of Peoples Temple", shown on PBS
Jonestown: 25 Years Later How spiritual journey ended in destruction Jim Jones led his flock to death in jungle by Michael Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Thursday, November 12, 1998.
Utopian nightmare Jonestown: What did we learn? Larry D. Hatfield, of The Examiner staff, Gregory Lewis and Eric Brazil of The Examiner staff and Examiner Librarian Judy Canter contributed to this report. Published Sunday, November 8, 1998.
Jones Captivated S.F.'s Liberal Elite They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor by Michael Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. And [Haunted by Memories of Hell ] by Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Thursday, November 12, 1998. Both stories were included in the first of a two-part series.
The End To Innocent Acceptance Of Sects Sharper scrutiny is Jonestown legacy by Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle religion writer. And Most Peoples Temple Documents Still Sealed by Michael Taylor and Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. And Surviving the Heart of Darkness Twenty years later, Jackie Speier remembers how her companions and rum helped her endure the night of the Jonestown massacre by Maitland Zane, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Friday, November 13, 1998. All stories were included in the second part of a two-part series.
Inside Peoples Temple Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy, Used by permission of authors for the San Francisco Chronicle. Published Monday, August 1, 1977.
20 Years Later, Jonestown Survivor Confronts Horrors by Michael Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Published Monday, November 2, 1998.
20 years after Jonestown, survivors find some peace by Anastasia Hendrix, of The Examiner staff. Published Thursday, November 19, 1998.
Category:1931 births
Category:1978 deaths
Category:American atheists
Category:American communists
Category:American Disciples of Christ
Category:American socialists
Category:Anti-racism
Category:Bisexual people
Category:Butler University alumni
Category:Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) clergy
Category:American Christians
Category:Deaths by firearm in Guyana
Category:Faith healers
Category:Founders of religions
Category:History of Guyana
Category:LGBT people from the United States
Category:Members of the Communist Party USA
Category:People from Randolph County, Indiana
Category:People from Richmond, Indiana
Category:Peoples Temple
Category:Religious people who committed suicide
Category:Suicides in Guyana
