Jim Jones — Father.
A gifted preacher with a genuine and early record on integration, and a man who staged fake healings from at least the Indianapolis years. Both are documented, and any account that keeps only one of them is not describing the person the members knew.
Jones is not explicable as a fraud who fooled people, and he is not explicable as an idealist who went wrong; both descriptions are documented and neither is sufficient. He integrated congregations in Indiana at real personal cost in the 1950s, took in children of several races, and ran services where a Black woman could be given the microphone in a city that had elected a Klan mayor within living memory. He also faked healings from the beginning, used sex and public humiliation as instruments of control, and was heavily dependent on amphetamines and barbiturates by 1978. His role here is filed as ultimate because that is what he had become to the community by the end, not because the tradition began there.
Five people died in the Port Kaituma airstrip shootings. They were: Congressman Leo Ryan; photographer Greg Robinson of The San Francisco Examiner; cameraman Bob Brown and reporter Don Harris from NBC; and Temple defector Patricia Parks.
Jonestown and Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive, San Diego State University University LibraryThe archive is edited by Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee, who lost family at Jonestown, and it indexes the FBI RYMUR file alongside the Temple's own tapes and papers.
The same ground, other faiths
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