James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader, preacher, and mass murderer who founded and led the Peoples Temple between 1955 and 1978. Jones and the members of his inner circle planned and orchestrated a mass murder–suicide that resulted in the deaths of over 900 people (approximately 396 children). He described the action as "revolutionary suicide", a term coined by Huey P. Newton. The people went to their deaths at the remote jungle commune which they had developed at Jonestown, Guyana, which was operated like a mini-totalitarian police state under official permission and a formal land lease from the Government of Guyana. U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, who had been visiting to investigate reports of human rights abuses and people wanting to leave, was also assassinated before his plane departed. Jones blended Pentecostal religious authority with Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, with an emphasis on racial equality during the civil rights movement, which resulted in most of his followers (and later victims) being African American.
As a child, Jones had developed an affinity for Pentecostalism and a desire to preach. He was ordained as a Christian minister in the Independent Assemblies of God, attracting his first group of followers while participating in the Pentecostal Latter Rain movement and the Healing Revival during the 1950s. Jones's initial popularity arose from his joint campaign appearances with the movement's prominent leaders William Branham and Joseph Mattsson-Boze, and their endorsement of his ministry.
Jones founded the organization that became the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955. In 1956, he began to be influenced by Father Divine and the Peace Mission movement. Jones distinguished himself through civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1964, he joined and was ordained a minister by the Disciples of Christ; his attraction to the Disciples was largely due to the autonomy and tolerance they granted to differing views within their denomination.
In 1965, Jones moved the Temple to California. The group established its headquarters in San Francisco, where he became deeply involved in political and charitable activity throughout the 1970s. Jones developed connections with prominent California politicians and was appointed as chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission in 1975. Beginning in the late 1960s, reports of abuse began to surface as Jones became increasingly vocal in his rejection of traditional Christianity; He began promoting a form of anti-capitalism that he called "Apostolic Socialism" and made claims of his own divinity. Jones became progressively more controlling of his followers in Peoples Temple, which had more than 3,000 members at its peak. His followers engaged in a communal lifestyle in which many turned over all their income and property to Jones and leaders of Peoples Temple, who directed all aspects of community life.
Following a period of negative publicity and reports of abuse at Peoples Temple, Jones ordered the construction of the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1974; he convinced or compelled hundreds of his followers to live there with him. He claimed that he was constructing a socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government.
By 1978, reports surfaced of human rights abuses and accusations that people were being held in Jonestown against their will. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune in November of that year to investigate these reports. While boarding a return flight with some former Temple members who wished to leave, Ryan and four others were murdered by gunmen from Jonestown.
Jones then ordered a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 912 commune members; most of the members died by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Those who resisted were forcefully injected with cyanide.
Early life Jim Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in the rural community of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (October 21, 1887 – May 29, 1951) and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 10, 1977). Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he and his mother both claimed to have some Cherokee ancestry, but there is no evidence of this. Jones' father was a disabled World War I veteran who suffered from severe breathing difficulties due to injuries sustained in a chemical weapons attack. He tried to augment his income by occasionally working on neighborhood road repair projects because his military pension was insufficient to support his family.
His father's illness led to financial difficulties and intense marital problems. In 1934, during the Great Depression, the Jones family was evicted from their home for failure to make mortgage payments. Their relatives purchased a shack in the nearby town of Lynn in which Jones grew up without plumbing and electricity. The family attempted to earn an income through farming but met with failure when the father's health further deteriorated. They often lacked adequate food, relied on financial support from their extended family, and sometimes resorted to foraging in the nearby forest and fields to supplement their diet.
According to multiple biographers, Jones' mother had "no natural maternal instincts" and frequently neglected her son. When Jones began school, his extended family threatened to cut off their financial assistance unless his mother got a job, forcing her to work outside her home. Meanwhile, Jones' father was hospitalized multiple times due to his illness. As a result, Jones' parents were frequently absent during his childhood. His aunts and uncles who lived close by gave him some supervision, but he often wandered the streets of the town, sometimes naked. Jones received some care from female residents of Lynn who frequently gave him food, clothing, and gifts.
Early religious and political influences Myrtle Kennedy, the wife of the Nazarene Church's pastor, developed an attachment to Jones. She gave Jones a Bible, encouraged him to study it, and taught him to follow the holiness code of the Nazarene Church. As Jones grew older, he attended services at most of the churches in Lynn, was baptized in several of them, and often went to multiple churches each week. Even as a child, Jones aspired to become a preacher, and began to practice preaching in private. His mother was disturbed when she caught him imitating the pastor of the local Apostolic Pentecostal Church and attempted unsuccessfully to prevent him from attending the church's services.
Although they had sympathy for Jones, his neighbors reported that he was an unusual child who was obsessed with religion and death. Jones regularly visited a casket manufacturer in Lynn and held mock funerals for roadkill that he collected. One neighbor stated that Jones killed a cat with a knife for a funeral. When he could not get other children to attend his funerals, he would perform the services alone.
Jones claimed to have exceptional abilities, such as the capacity to fly. When he leaped off a roof to demonstrate his abilities, he fell and broke his arm but persisted in his claims. He sometimes put other children into life-threatening situations and told them that he was guided by the Angel of Death. According to claims he made as an adult, Jones committed countless pranks in the churches he attended as a child. He claimed that he stole the Pentecostal minister's Bible and covered Acts 2:38 with cow manure. He also asserted that he had once substituted a cup of his urine for the holy water at a Catholic church.
One Jones biographer suggested that he developed his unusual proclivities because making friends was difficult for him. Although his neighbors regarded his religious practices as his strangest characteristic, they also reported that he misbehaved more seriously. He frequently stole candy from town merchants, leaving his mother required to pay for his thefts. Like his mother, who frequently swore in public and found amusement in people being offended at a woman cursing, Jones used offensive profanity, commonly greeting people with, "Good morning, you son of a bitch" or "Hello, you dirty bastard". His mother usually beat him with a leather belt to punish his misbehavior.
Jones developed an intense interest in social doctrines and became a voracious reader, studying Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, and Mahatma Gandhi. He told his wife that Mao Zedong was his hero. He spent hours in the community library and brought books home to read. Jones did not espouse any radical political views in his youth, but as World War II started, he became interested in the Nazi Party. He was fascinated by its pomp, their cohesion, and Hitler's total power. The members of his neighborhood found it disconcerting that he extolled Nazi Germany. Jones acted as a dictator over the other children, ordering them to goosestep together and beating those who disobeyed. One childhood friend recalled Jones shouting "Heil Hitler!" and giving the Nazi salute to German prisoners of war who were traveling to a detention facility. Commenting on his childhood, Jones stated: Tim Reiterman, a journalist and biographer of Jones, wrote that Jones's attraction to religion was strongly influenced by his desire for a family. Jones went to see the Kennedy family in 1942 when they spent the summer in Richmond, Indiana. They took part in services four times a week while attending a summer religious convention at a nearby Pentecostal church. When Jones returned to Lynn in the fall, he upset his neighborhood by explaining sexual reproduction in detail to young children. Jones's mother was urged to control his behavior by many individuals in Lynn, but she refused. Many parents decided to keep their kids away from Jones as a result of the issue. He had established himself as an outcast among his friends by the time he started high school and was progressively despised by the locals.
Education and marriage In middle school, Jones continued to stand out from his peers. Jones went by the nickname "Jimmy" during his youth, and almost always carried his Bible with him. Jones was a good student who enjoyed debating with his teachers. He also had the habit of refusing to respond to anyone who spoke to him first and only engaged in conversations when he started them. In contrast to his peers, Jones was known to dress in his Sunday church clothes every day of the week. His religious views alienated him from other young people. He frequently confronted them for drinking beer, smoking, and dancing. At times, he would even interrupt other young people's events and insist that they read the Bible with him.
Jones did not enjoy participating in sports because he detested losing, so he coached teams for younger children instead. Jones was disturbed by the treatment of the African Americans who were in attendance at a baseball game he attended in Richmond, Indiana. The events at that baseball game brought discrimination against African Americans to Jones's attention and influenced his strong aversion to racism. Jones's father belonged to the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which enjoyed considerable support in Indiana during the Great Depression. Jones described how he and his father had a disagreement about race and added that they had not spoken for "many, many years" as a result of his father's forbidding one of Jones's black friends from entering his home.