Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (* May 13, 1931 in Crete, Indiana, USA; † November 18, 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana) was a U.S. cult leader and the founder of the Peoples Temple. Over 900 of his followers died in a mass murder/suicide he ordered in the Guyana jungle in 1978.

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Family and childhood

Jim Jones grew up with his sister in very poor circumstances in the farming village of Lynn. His father was war invalid James Thurman Jones, who had suffered a severe lung ailment in World War I due to a mustard gas attack that left him unable to work for the rest of his life. His mother Lynetta was a factory worker and casual laborer who shut herself and her family off from the small-town community. Formative for her was an alleged dream in which her late mother prophesied that she would give birth to a son who would right all the wrongs of the world. After the birth of her son, she was convinced that her son would be a messiah.

After a near-miss with a train, a neighbor, Myrtle Kennedy, took him under her wing. She became a kind of surrogate mother for Jones and introduced him to the fundamentalist faith of the Church of the Nazarene. Here, for the first time, he experienced emotional attention that would bring order and direction to his previously largely unstructured life. He showed an early inclination to preach, but nevertheless always remained a loner. Later, Jim Jones found his home with the Pentecostal movement. In the early 1950s he was expelled from this fellowship.

In the early 1940s, his parents separated and Jim moved with his mother and her new partner to the nearby city of Richmond. Already during his high school years in the late 1940s, Jim Jones began to advocate for racial equality in explicit distinction from his father. He dropped out of a university education after a short time and began working as an orderly in a hospital. There he met Marceline Baldwin, a nurse four years his senior, whom he married in 1949. A roommate at the time later said Marceline was a kind of mother figure to Jones. Around this time, Jones found a father figure in the charismatic black preacher Father Divine, who became a role model for him.

Preacher and founder of a religion

In 1950 Jones and his wife moved to Indianapolis. Without being properly educated and ordained, he took a pastorate in the Methodist congregation there when he was only nineteen years old. There he espoused liberal views on civil rights and was actively involved in racial integration. Conservatives within the church reacted with hostility - among other things, dead animals were thrown into the church. Because of this hostility, he founded a sect called Wings of Deliverance on April 4, 1955, which he called the Community Unity Church (Assembly of God Church) from 1956. During a sermon series he led that year at the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis, he received the support of William Branham, who was a spiritual healer and prophet. In 1956, Jim Jones opened his own church, Peoples Temple in Indianapolis. Behind this was his dream of perfect harmony among the races within a utopian community, without hatred and without violence. The theology of Peoples Temple was highly syncretic. Pentecostalism was combined with elements of the ideologies of Karl Marx, Father Divine, Joseph Stalin, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Fidel Castro. Jim Jones appealed primarily to the disadvantaged, needy, and disoriented with his teachings, a blend of socialism and Christian belief in salvation. He substantiated his views on racial integration by adopting seven children of diverse backgrounds into his family. Because of his facial features and jet-black hair, he later developed the myth that his mother was an Indian.

In 1964, Jim Jones earned his bachelor's degree and was officially ordained as a minister in the Methodist Church. In 1961, he was appointed by the mayor of Indianapolis to head the Human Rights Commission there. Attacks by segregation advocates against him and his family increased at this time against the backdrop of the civil rights movement; at the same time, Jones's self-idealization grew, and he expected absolute loyalty from his followers. During an extended stay in South America to bring his family to safety from nuclear war, Jones made his first brief visit to Guyana in 1963.

In 1963 Jones finally renamed his church Peoples Temple and subsequently undertook revival journeys, on which he also increasingly practiced his alleged ability to pray for health. In 1965, he moved with about 150 faithful disciples, including many blacks, to a farm in the supposedly nuclear-bomb-proof town of Redwood Valley near Ukiah, California, 200 km north of San Francisco. Within a short time, the number of his followers there doubled. Through social activities, Jones subsequently gained such influence in San Francisco and the surrounding area that he was appointed a member and spokesman of the county grand jury in 1967. By the late 1960s, his following was estimated to be as high as 400. In San Francisco, the sect gained popularity not least because it offered free health tests and child care at its center in the Fillmore district, a ghetto in the city. His disciples were recruited largely from society's outcasts, the disaffected, the uprooted, the dislocated, and the idealistic-people to whom he was close because of his own life story. His thoughts and speeches increasingly revolved around the subject of sexuality. Relatives of cult members made accusations around this time that Jones was seducing female cult members and had impregnated several of them. On December 13, 1973, he was temporarily detained in Los Angeles for allegedly trying to entice an undercover police agent to engage in homosexual acts in a park.

Mass Suicide

To escape the growing pressure, Jones and his most devoted followers eventually left the country and resettled in Guyana, where they founded Jonestown in the jungle. Here Jones ruled unchallenged. When a delegation from the U.S. Congress arrived to investigate allegations that many U.S. citizens were being held against their will and mistreated there, Jones first arranged for an assassination attempt on the delegation on November 18, 1978, and then organized a mass murder/suicide in which he, along with over 900 people, also met his own death.

Jones' body was found with a gunshot wound to the left temple. To date, it has not been conclusively determined whether he killed himself. A United States Air Force autopsy scheduled and performed on December 15, 1978, could not rule out the possibility of a separate homicide.