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Jonestown: How a Dream of Justice Became a Massacre

The Peoples Temple did not begin as a death cult. It began, in the 1950s and 1960s, as a church that preached racial integration and social justice at a time when both were radical, that fed the poor and cared for the addicted and the elderly, and that drew to it thousands of idealistic people — many of them Black, many of them poor, many of them sincere seekers of a better and fairer world. At its head was Jim Jones, a charismatic preacher who could speak movingly of equality and who built real influence in California, courted by politicians and admired by progressives. But behind the movement's humane public face, Jones was constructing something else: a system of total control, sustained by manipulation, humiliation, sexual and physical abuse, financial exploitation, and a deepening, drug-fueled paranoia. As scrutiny closed in, he moved his followers to a remote agricultural settlement carved out of the Guyanese jungle — Jonestown — where, cut off from the outside world and utterly under his power, some thousand people lived in isolation and fear. When a United States congressman flew in to investigate reports of abuse, Jones had him murdered at a nearby airstrip. And that same day, 18 November 1978, he set in motion the final act he had long rehearsed: the deaths of everyone in Jonestown. More than nine hundred people died, poisoned with cyanide — many of them forced, many coerced, and more than three hundred of them children who could not consent at all. It was not, for most of the victims, a suicide. It was a massacre. This is the story of how a dream of justice became one of the worst atrocities of its kind in modern history — and of the people who died in it.