Jim Jones

About Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the American founder of the Peoples Temple, which became synonymous with mass suicide after the November 18, 1978 death of over 900 people from cyanide poisoning in their isolated agricultural intentional community called Jonestown, along with the death of 9 other people at a nearby airstrip and in Georgetown. To the extent the actions in Jonestown were viewed as a mass suicide, it is one of the largest such mass suicides in history, perhaps the largest in over 1,900 years and the largest mass suicide of United States citizens. One of those dying at the nearby airstrip was Leo Ryan, who became the first and only Congressman murdered in the line of duty in the history of the United States.

Jones was born in Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones, a World War I veteran, and Lyneta Putnam. He would later claim part Cherokee descent through his mother. In 2007 interviews with PBS, childhood acquaintances recalled Jones as being a "weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death;" they further claimed that Jones frequently held funerals for small animals, and heard a story of Jones fatally stabbing a cat. He graduated from Richmond High School in Richmond, Indiana. In 1951 Jones and his wife Marceline moved to Indianapolis, where Jones enrolled in Butler University attending night school and earned a degree in secondary education in 1961.

In 1951, Jones began attending communist meetings and rallies in Indianapolis. Jones became flustered at harassment he received during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding meetings between Jones and his mother with Paul Robeson. He also became frustrated with what he perceived to be ostracism of open communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself "how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."