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Remembering Jonestown, 40 years later
Jim Jones was born in Indiana, and was known as a child prodigy; strange and intelligent. He developed a charismatic nature, growing up. This allowed him to wield elements of certain protestant faiths, like Pentecostalism, with much influence. It caused him to earn many African-American followers.
Rev. Jones and his wife, taken from a photo album in Jonestown.
In fact, over two-thirds of the persons who died in the murder-suicide were African-Americans.
He called his church the People’s Temple; an institution that advocated for communal living, and was exceptionally racially integrated for its time. Popular leftist icons like Harvey Milk, Huey Newton and Angela Davis had admired Jones for his passion and advocacy.
However, there were rumblings about the church in those days; that workers were expected to devote themselves to the church entirely, with little to no compensation – or contact with their families. They were even made to raise their children in Jones’s commune.
Amidst complaints, Jones moved the headquarters of his church from San Francisco, California to Guyana; in the wilderness a few miles off Port Kaituma. He did this so that he could escape the purview of the global society to create the communist utopia that he dreamed of. When his church arrived, they worked to convert the jungle into an agricultural commune called Jonestown.
Jones would deliver monologues to the people by megaphone as they worked in the commune. Law and order would be enforced by armed guards, which he called “The Red Brigade”. The passion of the gathering led to many volunteers arming themselves to defend the Jonestown community to the death.
Jones developed a tradition called ‘white nights’, where he would lead the commune in mass suicide drills, as practice if they ever needed that last resort to keep out the trappings of the global society.
At the bidding of concerned family members in the US, the California congressman Leo Ryan organized a delegation of journalists and others to make a fact-finding mission to Jonestown. The group arrived in Jonestown on November 17, 1978.
They had received an audience from Jones. However, they decided to call the visit short when one of the commune’s militant members tried to stab the congressman.
Bodies littered throughout the community.
Accompanied by a dozen Jonestown inhabitants who had asked to leave the commune, the team left for the airstrip, escorted by Jones’s deputies. As the group boarded their planes, Jones’s escorts opened fire and began to riddle the passengers with bullets, killing Congressman Ryan and four others, including two photographers who captured footage of the attack before they died. Wounded survivors dragged their bleeding bodies into the forest.
At Jonestown, Reverend Jones decided to have his commune undertake the final “White Night” to seal their fate. To quell doubts of hope of escape, he told the community that he had Ryan shot, and that mass suicide would be their only fate. Some accepting, others likely coerced, were given cups of cyanide punch. Over 300 children were poisoned first.
The next morning, Guyanese troops arrived to find over 900 bodies littered across what was, days ago, a busy commune. There were few survivors, most of which hid during the poisoning, and an elderly woman who slept through the ordeal and woke up to find everyone dead. Jones’s body was found with a gunshot, which the police determined was self-inflicted.
On November 18, 1978, Reverend Jim Jones led the mass murder-suicide of 918 people (including children) in the settlement, at the nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma.
Today marks 40 years since the Jonestown Massacre rocked the region, and placed international attention on Guyana, in one of the worst ways possible.
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