On may 13 1931 Jim Jones was born
Jim Jones was born in a small city called Crete this city is in Indiana.
When Jim Jones was growing up he and his mother moved to Richmond, Indiana for financial help where Jim would work at a hospital in 1946.
Jim went to church but didn’t really like it. Until he went to a church for colored people he was amazed the people at the church were so happy they were singing and clapping and having a good time. Jim loved the church. So in 1954 in Indianapolis Indiana Jimwas the founder to a church called the people church
A lot of people loved this church because it included colored and white people. So there was no segregation which was a big thing back then. The church was called the peoples temple.
One of the things that happened at the people’s temple that made people love and be more attracted to the church was that in the audience Jim would send a girl in a wheelchair up and pray then the girl would stand up. These were staged Jim just wanted to make more money and have more people to come. Jim did the same thing with cancer patients where they would pray over them and magically they don’t have cancer anymore . In reality they didn’t have cancer to begin with, same with the people in wheelchairs.
Around the time when the peoples temple was around 10-15 years in the running, Jim started wearing these thick black glasses, kind of the style of aviators but more box shaped. The reason why Jim was wearing these glasses was because he did drugs. People suspect he wasn’t addicted to them but he took them enough for him to be sensitive to light. Or people have suspected that he didn’t want people to see his blood shot eyes.
At this point Jim relocated to California where there were 7 churches and his wife (Carolyn Moore Layton) would help him run the church. At this point the church has been running for 17-20 years and has more than 20,000 people in the church but 5000-3000 was way more likely we don’t really know. Jim did make the headquarters in San Francisco. Around the year 1977 Jim was talking to the people about having a city for his church in guyana which is a country in south america. He starts telling people about the trip. Like I’m going to Guyana to start a city called Jones town. Anyone is welcome!
If you decide to go on the trip that was the biggest mistake of your life because this is were one of the most well known mass suicide happened.
People were hopping on planes and taking the longish trip down to South America to go to
guyana. Most of Jim’s followers went but some of them stayed behind. People love Jones town. It has everything: religion , food , water , shelter , and warmth. It was close to one thousand people living down there
About 6 months some people were not feeling right. Tracy didn’t want to go to Jonestown but her dad insisted. It will be fun, he would say to her. In the later months the dad did not feel right. In a safety check were this one man came to Jonestown, The dad and the family asked if he could take them home he said yes but when they were boarding the planes two guys shot them so the guy doing the safety check the mom and like 5 other people died so the kids ran into the jungle to wait tell someone else came to the town to rescue them. The kids and the dad survived and told their story later.
A couple days later Jim supposed that more people would come to the town because of the shooting so what he did was he got buckets of potassium cyanide that was were they all eat and starting pouring it into this fruit punch drink that people have referred to kool-aid while people were drinking the kool-aid Jim was preaching to everyone. He said that people were coming to the town and they were going to kill everybody so just drink the drink and it’s way more moral. If you did not drink the drink they would shoot you in the head because there was a guard right next to the kool-aid bucket
In reality no one was supposed to go to the town. People have just speculated that Jim has always had a plan to kill his followers. The death toll was roughly 909 people dead but there was likely way more. Most of the deaths were middle aged to young kids that died. In the end the guards drank the kool-aid and Jim Jones shot himself in the head because that’s a less painful way to die.