The Jonestown Massacre. Jim Jones (b. 1931) was a charismatic American cult leader, founder of the Peoples Temple and instigator of a hideous mass suicide. A devotee of Marxism, Jones viewed Christianity as a way to spread the communist gospel. His advanced views on racial integration won him considerable support in political circles and a multi-racial church following.
After moving his church from Indiana to California in the 1960s, Jones established a number of Peoples Temples across the state. His ability to mobilize black voters for Democratic candidates led to commendations from Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter and Harvey Milk but his disenchantment with orthodox Christianity was becoming more open. When news of his sexual and physical abuse of congregation members was about to be exposed Jones moved hundreds of his followers to “Jonestown”, a farm commune the Temple had established in Guyana.
Relatives of Temple members bombarded the American government with tales of kidnapped and maltreated inhabitants of Jonestown. In November 1978 Congressman Leo Ryan and an NBC News crew visited the site to investigate and to take back any Temple members who wished to return to the United States. They and the defectors were gunned down at an airfield by men loyal to Jones. Later that day, drug-addled and paranoid Jones convinced hundreds of Temple members to kill their children and commit “revolutionary suicide”, telling them that they would soon be attacked and tortured by outside forces. 909 bodies were found in Jonestown, including that of Jim Jones.